Introduction | What is B2b eMarket | Revenue Sources | Business Models | Landscape | The Alternative | Conclusion | eMarketplaces | Web Resources | Bibliography

Conclusion

Although still in their infancy, the e-marketplaces have a potential to drive the business-to-business (r)evolution. They offer both to buyers and sellers strong possibilities to reduce transaction costs, enhance sales and distribution processes, deliver and consume value added services and streamline customer management.

Most of the e-marketplaces today follow the centralized approach. Their main advantage is that they expand both supplier and buyer market reach. Without such focal points, buyers could have great difficulty finding suppliers with the right qualities and prices, and suppliers could have difficulty finding motivated buyers. Such e-marketplaces also significantly cut the operational costs. Most of them now provide (or are moving to provide) support for procurement processes that traditionally consume much staff time and effort, and a bunch of different value added services. But still, although their business propositions are definitively sound the vast majority of them is facing fundamental liquidity problems. Very few of them managed so far to attract a sufficient number of buyers and sellers to function smoothly. One of the widely discussed reasons for their low liquidity is that suppliers have typically spent a large amount of money on building reputation and brand. Therefore they have seen this type of e-markets just as giant systems that would submerge all their efforts into one simple online item. Also, aside from an inhibition about changing their habits, suppliers, particularly the SMEs, have had widespread concerns about fraud and the high costs associated with wiring up. They still lack knowledge of and a familiarity with technology and thus doubt whether it can save them time and money. The centralized e-marketplaces are, therefore, generally forced to invest further in changing the perception and the entrenched habits of business owners, as well as in the development of the interoperability capabilities, to reach a critical mass of transactions and become profitable.

For de-centralized, peer-to-peer e-markets, the existing business habits and the natural resistance to change are less of an issue. By their nature, the P2P networks respect their existing way of doing business (workflow and legacy computer systems) and allow each company to control how it transacts business with other participating companies. The costs of joining the network are less prohibitive as well, and therefore de-centralized e-marketplaces are expected to have better chances in attracting SMEs. Considering that they constitute more than 80% of the total number of enterprises, they may have thereby better chances to achieve the early liquidity as well. But, aside that there are not so many networks of that kind available yet, the security and privacy aspects, as well as the interoperability at the end, are issues yet to be solved in the future, so that this networks could really take off.

In brief, both the centralized and the P2P systems, offer different, propelling benefits to business participants, but they both still have numerous issues to solve, before they will attract and support the vast majority of business.

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