Technologies and approaches in the field of electronic commerce are not mature enough in order to allow for their broad successful commercial application. Neither existing, successful approaches that are very much restricted to large companies, specific branches, and business domains, nor approaches just merging new technologies like Internet, WWW, and XML allow for scaling up electronic commerce by means of arbitrarily high numbers of partners. All these approaches lack substantial reflection and integration of business semantics as the basis of any electronic commerce partnership. ebXML is a world-wide initiative that tries to address the drawbacks of existing standards and approaches and has the potential to successfully deliver solutions to these problems. We address the status of ebXML and identify open research issues to be solved in order to meet some of the obstacles on the way to a commercial application of ebXML.