E-marketplaces from Seller's Perspective
by:
Nowshade Kabir
What is an E-marketplace anyway?
E-marketplace is a business to business web based venue, wherever
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 amount of buyers and suppliers can be maintained as a community. A participant of an E-marketplace can be a buyer, a marketer or both. Unlike an E-distribution portal which is adjusted to assist suppliers merchandising 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 purchasing and merchandising opportunities, do sales offers and buy products and services, add products and services to aggregate e-catalog and use many
another value accessorial features.
E-marketplaces are enormously beneficial to all businesses that decide to participate in them. However, the potential benefits that a institution can accrue from an E-marketplace are directly proportional to the factor — how heavily the institution uses the offered features of that E-marketplace. Naturally, a institution that does 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 body
overhead cost savings, reduced paper work, better client service, reduced product distribution cost 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 institution productivity: Revenue Growth and Cost Savings.
Revenue Growth
Expand Client 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, faster
response to their requests, get better client keep and buy products online.
Revenue Increase from Value Accessorial Services
Once an E-marketplace is set as primary sales channel, freed resources can be used to create more value accessorial services for clients. Several of the services that the E-marketplace offers besides can be utilised to generate more value.
Cost Savings
Order Process
Cost
The supply chain solutions of E-marketplace allow sellers to reduce order process
cost significantly. Studies show that cost of process
a purchase order can be reduced from US$ 70 down to US$ 6 only.
Sales and keep costs
By automating sales and client keep processes companies can reduce over head cost over 25-30% easily.
Inventory keeping costs
Clearer visibility and prediction ability allow companies well 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 contour
supply chain mechanism. Galore 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 many
benefits that it can provide?
As most of the body
and operational tasks are done mechanically
by the e-marketplaces, participation in them is not a difficult process.
These are the basic steps that a marketer must take to participate in an E-marketplace:
Register
Registration mightiness be an easy job of filling up a form. It is more better to take several initial preparations before doing this.
Choose a nice 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 institution image.
Logo: your logotype 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 several times to find the perfect subcategories for your products or services. If you have any doubt contact the client keep of the E-marketplace. Fill up as galore given fields are there for a product as you can. The more information purchaser gets right away the faster
his purchasing decision would-be be.
Create offers
Most sophisticated E-marketplaces have various sales platforms apart from the E-catalog inclusion. Do general sales offers, time sensitive offers (hot offers – with offer termination dates) and auction offers of your products and services. Determine the terms and methods of price, payment and shipment.
Decide how you wish 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 besides have to amount out what part of your back office can be integrated to the E-marketplace.
Nowshade Kabir, Ph.D., is the founder, primary developer and present CEO, of Rusbiz.com, a worldwide business to business e-commerce portal with feature like storefronts, aggregate catalog, e-marketplace, trade leads, internal electronic messaging system supply chain solutions, etc. With a doctor's degree in Information Technology, Dr. Kabir has worked an adviser to government projects and has over 12 years experience in International Trade. An author of galore B2B and business related articles; he publishes a bi-weekly E-zine for online business community. You can subscribe to his news-sheet free of charge from http://www.rusbiz.com.
nowshade@rusbiz.com
