Paperless Processes and Digitalization in Foreign Trade

Foreign trade transactions are not only a process between the buyer and the seller, it is also a long process involving multiple parties. All these parties come together and operate with multiple legal regulations and documents to be complied with for each party.The diversity of these documents and physical dependence on paper make difficult foreign trade transaction processes more difficult and increase time losses, human error probability, archiving costs and cause financial losses for each party carrying out the foreign trade transactions for all these reasons.Foreign trade parties,who are competing in a global market with globalizing world, lose their competitive advantage due to this costs and time loses and reflect these all costs to the sales price of the products/services.In this thesis, information about the processes of the existing foreign trade transactions is given and the effects of digitalization, which shows its effect in every field, to the foreign trade transactions and the digitalization of the foreign trade transactions and the studies conducted by international institutions and organizations, states and private companies for the digitalization of foreign trade.