6 Industry Consortium Marketplace vs. Private Company Marketplace

I’d like to tell you a few reasons why a buyer might want to be part of an industry consortium marketplace rather than setting up its own private company marketplace but first I must tell what industry consortium marketplace and a private company marketplace are.

A Quick Business Lesson…

For those who are new to business, the world isn’t full of companies making product just for customers, for instance: McDonalds doesn’t grow, wash, cut the potatoes they have a whole string of companies that they buy from for their famous fries. The company that sells part of the final product to another company is called supplier. The company that puts the materials from all the suppliers together and mass produces the final product is call the manufacturer. The company that sells the final product to customers like you and me are called vendors, (sometimes the manufacturer is also the vendor).

An industry consortium marketplace and private company marketplace are types of business to business marketplace, where suppliers and manufacturers/vendors can find and make proposals, quotes, negotiations, tender, and transactions. For this blog I will mainly talk about business to business (B2B) eMarketplaces, aka online electronic marketplaces or web portals.

What is a web portal?

A few examples are iGoogle, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, and my favorite New Grounds. In short, a web portal is a website that puts together and displays information and media from a bunch other resources. When a user signs in a portal they can change some of the content and apps displayed on home page. Portals have features like a search engine, email, news, info, forums, video, pictures, audio, corporate databases, etc., things that would have been different entities all on their own.

 screenshot http://www.newgrounds.com/

                There are actually 5 types of B2B marketplaces, seen in the image below.

                One reason a buyer would want to be part of an industry consortia marketplace instead of setting up its own private company marketplace is that the buyer would attract more sellers in an industry consortium marketplace. Secondly, the main advantage of companies to join an industry consortium marketplace is to pool resources together to reduce costs, save time and effort. The costs can be very high for a company building their own private marketplace.  And Thirdly, a company would have to be well known, have a good reputation, and be doing pretty well to have their own private marketplace otherwise they would get no traffic from sellers for bids. So for a business that’s, medium, small, or just starting out doing a private company marketplace would not be the way to go.

For more real life examples of eMarketplaces see links below…

https://www.aeroxchange.com/aexportal/

Aerospace: 13 airlines worldwide

http://www.exostar.com/

Exostar: Worldwide defense companies: BAE SYSTEMS, boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Rolls-Royce

http://www.quadrem.com/

Quadrem: Worldwide Mining companies: Alcan Inc, Alcoa Inc, Anglo American plc, Barrick Gold Corporation, BHP Billiton, Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD), Corporacion Nacional del Cobre de Chile (Codelco), De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd, Glencore International AG, Imerys, Inco Limited, Newmont Mining Corporation, Noranda Inc, Penoles, Phelps Dodge Corporation, Rio Tinto, Votorantim Group, WMC Limited

http://site.agentrics.com/en/home

Agentrix: Worldwide Retail, the merger of GNX and WWRE

http://www.steel24-7.com/

Worldwide steel

2 Three Snazzy Websites

 There are many things I love about newegg.com (as well as the company itself) but probably the most unique thing I like is the navigation. Not the navigation on the home page but if you just search for a product and start narrowing down your search results there will be at list of links in order of how you  would’ve of got there if you didn’t use NewEgg’s search bar. For example: Home>Computer Hardware>Memory>Desktop Memory>Kingston HyperX>Capacity 2GB>Type: 240-pm DDR2DRAM>Speed: DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)

                                                              (screenshot)

Deviantart.com I don’t visit often enough, for the mere fact that it’s a place on the web you can spend several hours on and not notice. Deviantart does a good job of handling lots of media files and keeping page load time down.

For all we know Google company might just take over the software world and run out Microsoft when Google starts making operating systems and hardware. Google.com is one of the top websites hands down, mostly for the genius search engine but I’d like to point out for this blog the under-mentioned services Google provides: Gmail, Google Calendar, iGoogle, Google Tasks, etc. It is amazing for one website can do so many different things but still be organized enough for users to access everything easily and quickly.

 With Gmail, Google’s email, introduction to the “tag” organizational system saves the user trouble of making folders and putting their email in folders, it solves the problem of if an email involves two different topics and you don’t know which folder to put the email in – just put two tags on it. I can’t wait until we can do that kind of file system on personal computers; most people don’t know that if you have 1,000 files each in 100 folders takes up more memory than does the same 1,000 files in two folders. ECU’s pirate mail could take a lesson or two from Gmail, it’d be great if pirate mail would require a tag just like a subject line before sending out an email. In addition iGoogle is a nice where the user can edit the Google search home page with mini Google product iframes and apps for popular websites like Facebook.