In third-party marketplaces, a provider puts the catalogues of connected suppliers online, offering catalogue search facilities, ordering, and secure payment platforms to buyers (Timmers and Gasos, 2002).
The Internet has had a significant impact on the development of third party marketplaces which incorporates end customer (B2C) and inter-organisational (B2B) commerce practices. The former includes successful B2C third-party marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon (Brynjolfsson et al., 2006; Curran et al., 2006). The latter originated from electronic data exchange (EDI), which allowed businesses and their partners to exchange information over proprietary value-added networks (VANs). At the beginning of the 2000s it was estimated at around US$1.4t (Ganesh et al., 2005).
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Effective and strategic catalogue management helps to ensure the quality of product data and that the data are configurable to the buyer's required format (CIPS:...
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Reverse auctions create an environment where suppliers bid against each other for a contract. This environment encourages competition with the result that goods and services are offered...
ECommerce offers a wide range of benefits to customers and to businesses, including cost and time savings (Laudon and Laudon, 2007).