An
e-marketplace is complex digital business that supports multiple suppliers and multiple buying organizations.
On the supply side of the business, it has multiple distributors, manufacturers, trading partners, and other e-marketplaces that are required to deliver special
processes, services, protocols, formats, and integration.
On the demand side of the business, it has many buying organizations, e-marketplaces, and individuals with distinct and sometimes disparate processes, protocols, and formats. All the elements on both the sides require superior service to keep them coming back to the marketplace and priorities are given to serve the demand chain better than the supply chain.
The challenges of attracting and retaining an effective demand chain:
- Need to offer a comprehensive catalog to buyers, with buyer-specific standards and pricing.
- Automation / Integration throughout the trading community to achieve the maximum value from each of
the trading partners.
- Effective relationships management is required to understand the transactions throughout your marketplace to make better business decisions.
Other e-Processes
e-Tailing
:
E-tailing is the process of developing and managing online storefronts whereby
individual consumers can shop for goods and services.
The focus of e-tailing is on consumer shopping, not business-to-business commerce. The intent of e-tailing is to provide a customer value proposition
that is different from real space stores. That value proposition often includes cheaper prices, increased flexibility, convenience and consumer empowerment of
the shopping process.
e-Relationships
:
E-relationships are relationships with Internet customers that are highly
automated and result in extensive customer profiles that can be leveraged into one-to-one marketing programs.
E-relationships are "managed" using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software whereby the complete history of a company's dealings and communications
with a customer are maintained. Any employee within an organization can access and add information to the customer's profile, whether they are in marketing,
sales, finance, customer service, fulfillment, R&D or any other department that
may interact with customers.
Using e-relationship strategies, customer profiles are used to develop customized content, products and marketing strategies.
e-Merchandising
:
E-merchandising is the process of using customer profiles and database "data-mining" techniques to implement permission marketing and cross-selling.
E-merchandising is often used as a sales promotion technique to obtain additional or incremental sales while a customer is visiting a web site. This is
done by customizing the visitors web pages to promote products or offer additional options that may interest them.
e-Payments
:
E-payments are online financial transactions whereby monetary value is exchanged.
Today, most consumer online e-payments are credit-card based and consist of using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption to send credit card information to a
merchant. The merchant in turn sends the credit card number and other customer information to a credit-card clearing house for verification and authorization.
Many new forms of e-payment are currently in development including e-cash, e-checks and e-coupons.
e-Procurement :
E-procurement is the process of applying Internet technologies to help manage a
company's supply chain. The essential Internet tool to accomplish this is an extranet, which is usually a password protected secure network behind the
company's firewall. The extranet might allow access to certain areas of the corporate intranet as well as special areas designed for a companies suppliers
and distributors.
E-procurement technologies, in addition to standard web-based communications, often provide a web interface to a company's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
type software. Market growth for e-procurement will likely expand rapidly to
small- and mid-size companies once EDI-type functionality (Electronic Data Interchange) is standardized for the Internet.
e-Services (Applications)
:
E-services are web-based applications that allow server-to-server or application-to-application communications. Sometimes called web services,
e-services assume that companies have valuable content that can be made available via the Internet. Web applications can discover, negotiate and
complete transactions automatically based on their configuration and operating rules. The Microsoft .Net framework supports e-services within the context of
"software as a service."
e-Services (Consulting)
:
E-services are consulting or partnership services that enable or facilitate
Internet-based business processes, often with an emphasis on managing transactions. E-services are either front-office oriented with a focus on
consumers and clients, or back-office oriented with a focus on procurement and logistics.
Providers of e-services can include management consultants, systems integrators and software developers, as well as e-business virtual networks and online
financial operators.
e-Government :
E-government is bringing government services to the people via the Internet. The
primary purpose of e-government is to provide citizen-oriented Internet activities to expand the reach and richness of government services. The
penultimate e-government service is online balloting during elections, though
this service is some years a way.
E-government ought to reduce the cost of government operations for the simple
reason that government services are often monopolistic. As a result government agencies can (in theory) quickly achieve economies of scale with an assured
market demand.
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