Buyers And Sellers

Marketplace solutions are a relative newcomer to E-commerce, and very few online marketplaces exist today. Marketplace applications create a virtual community that brings together multiple suppliers and buyers. In this case, the marketplace provider supplies the application infrastructures that let multiple parties transact business. This application type is more prevalent in the business-to-consumer market (for example, eBay's online auctions), but is now starting to appear in the business-to-business sector.

Such communities create secondary markets that make sense for specific vertical industries, such as steel, chemicals, or plastics. For example, a steel vendor can use a marketplace provider such as MetalSite to sell steel to a community of interested buyers. Such sites allow for many-to-many relationships, and the marketplace provider will probably collect a fee on every transaction.
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In addition, marketplaces can be used for auctions, creating a market for excess inventory that might otherwise go to waste.

Another example is a large franchise such as a fast-food chain. This company can set up a marketplace in which all franchises act as buyers, and all suppliers of napkins, beef, and other products act as sellers. The parent company can create a marketplace application to facilitate buying and selling while maintaining control over the marketplace itself.

One of the key factors to keep in mind while evaluating marketplace applications is the protection of buyer-seller relationships. For example, many customers may have negotiated private contracts with particular sellers--and the contract price must be protected from other buyers and sellers, something that can be a challenge in a marketplace environment. In addition, a marketplace application may need to support secure contract negotiations among buyers and sellers
One of the key factors to keep in mind while evaluating marketplace applications is the protection of buyer-seller relationships. For example, many customers may have negotiated private contracts with particular sellers--and the contract price must be protected from other buyers and sellers, something that can be a challenge in a marketplace environment. In addition, a marketplace application may need to support secure contract negotiations among buyers and sellers.
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The only two vendors we saw whose products support marketplace applications are Trade'ex (Procurement for the Marketplace) and Connect Inc. (MarketStream). Trade'ex provides a packaged application for marketplace uses, making it easy for service providers or portals to get into the game. Connect Inc.'s primary revenue source is in services, and the company will use its technology to build marketplace applications for consolidators and aggregators. In the future, expect portal service providers such as Yahoo and America Online/ Netscape to play in the marketplace arena.

E-commerce applications have four distinct layers: low-level system services (load balancing, scalability, failover, database connection pooling, etc.), specific business logic (catalog functionality, inventory-handling capabilities, or shipment request and tracking functionality), administration (which can also include modules for target marketing or personalization), and payment processing.

No matter what type of application you're trying to implement, your application must include these layers. Clearly, you have choices when it comes to application development and deployment. There are five basic approaches you can take:
• Build a homegrown solution. You can always build your application from scratch. You'll have lots of freedom and flexibility--but you'll need a team of skilled developers to do lots of low-level coding, and you'll have to maintain the application code yourself. While this approach used to be a company's only option, today there are simpler ways to create E-commerce apps.
• Use Web application development tools plus in-house customization. Most development environments for Web applications provide low-level system services and graphical development environments. Using these tools, organizations can simplify development and leverage the low-level services that are already provided in the application server environment. Incorporating the commerce portion of the application will require custom development.
Some vendors that provide these middle-tier servers include Allaire, Bluestone Software, EveryWare Development, Haht Software, Netscape, NetDynamics (recently purchased by Sun Microsystems), SilverStream; and the BEA WebXpress division of BEA Systems (formerly WebLogic). -------- www.e-shops-list.com ----- Convenience you can never imagine ---- online store list -----

• Use Web application development tools plus specialized E-commerce toolkits. Many vendors provide E-commerce toolkits that can be used in conjunction with Web application development environments and servers. The result is a further simplification of the development process, eliminating the need to build the commerce transaction portion of the application from scratch. Examples of E-commerce toolkits include Microsoft's Site Server Commerce Edition and IBM's Net.Commerce.
• Use packaged applications. Packaged E-commerce applications are designed to provide most of an application right out of the box, which hopefully means rapid deployment. With these applications, getting a system up and running is more of a configuration and setup issue than a custom-development initiative. On the downside, such applications may lack the flexibility to perform specialized or highly complex processing, and they can be far more expensive than E-commerce toolkits. In addition, many packaged applications use their own low-level services instead of leveraging industry-standard middleware or application servers, which may sacrifice reliability and scalability.
• Outsource everything to a third party or hosting service. Of course, you can always contract with an integrator or service provider to build and maintain your application, and even host it externally. This approach is especially attractive to smaller companies that lack internal development resources and expertise.
Outsourcing relieves you of the headaches associated with development and maintenance, but you may be giving away some flexibility and control. Keep in mind that not many service providers offer sophisticated outsourcing and hosting services for business-to-business applications, although it is a prime area for market growth. In addition, you may have to pay a fee for every transaction your service provider handles.
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