What is an E-marketplace anyway?

E-marketplace is a business to business web based venue, where
buyers and sellers meet online, generate business leads and
conduct business transactions. The e-marketplace features are
tailored in a manner so that a large numbers of buyers and
suppliers can be serviced as a community. A participant of an
E-marketplace can be a buyer, a seller or both. Unlike an
E-distribution portal which is oriented to assist suppliers
selling their products or an E-procurement system which is
focused on buyers solely, an E-marketplace is a platform which
caters buyers and sellers equally. As a participant of an
E-marketplace you are able to explore buying and selling
opportunities, make sales offers and buy products and services,
add products and services to aggregated e-catalog and use
numerous other value added features. E-marketplaces are
tremendously beneficial to all businesses that decide to
participate in them. However, the potential benefits that a
company can accrue from an E-marketplace are directly
proportional to the factor — how heavily the company uses the
offered features of that E-marketplace. Naturally, a company
that makes e-marketplace as its primary sales channel and
integrates its sales resources to supply chain solutions of the
E-marketplace avail more in sales and administrative overhead
cost savings, reduced paper work, better customer service,
reduced product distribution costs and online sales growth than
a seasonal user of the e-marketplace.

A committed participant of an E-marketplace can benefit from and
improve two primary factors of company productivity: Revenue
Growth and Cost Savings. Revenue Growth Expand Customer Base A
seller, once registered with an E-marketplace, gets immediate
access to a large community of prospective buyers of his
products or services.

Revenue Increase from Existing Clients Existing clients get
faster and easier access to product information, quicker
response to their requests, get better customer support and buy
products online.

Revenue Increase from Value Added Services Once an E-marketplace
is set as primary sales channel, freed resources can be used to
create more value added services for clients. Some of the
services that the E-marketplace offers also can be utilized to
generate more value. Cost Savings Order Processing Cost The
supply chain solutions of E-marketplace allow sellers to reduce
order processing cost significantly. Studies show that cost of
processing a purchase order can be reduced from US$ 70 down to
US$ 6 only.

Sales and support costs By automating sales and customer support
processes companies can reduce over head costs over 25-30%
easily.

Inventory keeping costs Clearer visibility and forecasting
ability allow companies considerably reduce inventory keeping
costs.

Most executives agree that primary reason why they feel that the
companies should participate in E-marketplace is its ability to
streamline supply chain mechanism. Many inherent inefficiencies
of supply chain process can be eliminated thanks to integrated
to e-marketplaces supply chain solutions.

What sellers have to do in order to participate in
E-marketplaces and reap numerous benefits that it can provide?
As most of the administrative and operational tasks are done
automatically by the e-marketplaces, participation in them is
not a difficult process.

These are the basic steps that a seller must take to participate
in an E-marketplace:

Register Registration might be an easy job of filling up a form.
It is much better to take some initial preparations before doing
this.

Choose a good login name: your login can be used by the
E-marketplace to give you subdomain name, i.e.
login.e-marketplace_name.com.

Profile: A well-written profile increases company image.

Logo: your logo helps you brand your company.

Add your products or services to E-catalog

Most E-marketplaces furnish with easy to use forms or wizards
for sellers to add their products to E-catalog. As the product
and service classification used in the E-catalogs often is an
industry standard, it is important to spend some times to find
the perfect subcategories for your products or services. If you
have any doubt contact the customer support of the
E-marketplace. Fill up as many given fields are there for a
product as you can. The more information buyer gets right away
the faster his buying decision would be.

Create offers

Most sophisticated E-marketplaces have various sales platforms
apart from the E-catalog inclusion. Make general sales offers,
time sensitive offers (hot offers – with offer expiry dates) and
auction offers of your products and services. Determine the
terms and methods of price, payment and shipment. Decide how you
will handle portions of the supply chain that you have to do
offline.

Although, most of the supply chain process can be done online,
not all e-marketplace offer a complete end to end solution. You
also have to figure out what part of your back office can be
integrated to the E-marketplace.