So, time to invest in e-marketplace stocks again? Not even with your tongue firmly in cheek. Even companies that are doing reasonably well in the space, such as Ariba, caution that the model has shifted. No one -- especially users -- expects to sign on to a big e-marketplace and save fortunes. "There's a new e-marketplace business model, giving value to members, but without significant expectations of high volumes," explains Ariba's European VP of marketing, Steve Muddiman.
Instead, e-marketplaces 2.0 are all about exchanging information that can add value, he says. "Companies have more sorts of relationship with suppliers and customers than ones based on just price. The successful marketplaces are those offering data on complex categories relevant to their specialist members -- we've come a long way from straight reverse auctions."
A good example here would be Spain's LeatherXchange e-marketplace, which successfully backed off from trying to be a buying and selling arena to offering specialist information like current market pricing data and other such nice-to-have's -- things users want much more.
Lack of standards
We mentioned low transaction throughput earlier. Of course another big obstacle to e-marketplaces was lack of standards. And before you mention 'XML', well, therein lies the rub. Such is the view of Pieter Eksteen, European product manager for business process management specialist Commerce Quest: "A severe lack of standards -- or rather a plethora of standards, like all those XMLs we know have to choose from -- has been a big barrier to more business-to-business exchanges taking off."
A reasonable position might be that when Web services and more practical information exchange languages like Microsoft-IBM's BPEL (Business Process Exchange Language) come on stream, we can expect more marketplace activity.
Not everyone's so convinced. Ilidio Ferreira, senior analyst at UK-based consultancy Ovum, says: "I don't expect the marketplace to change that much in the next couple of years. In many ways the respectable e-marketplace business there is out there is really just a part of integration work being done by big firms, and may become just a subset of that. Service Oriented Architecture will make applications in general more open, but not for some time yet."
The verdict's clear: until we have real Web services, the jury's still out on mission-critical B2B trading taking off. Still, isn't it ironic that as we all spend so much online in the B2C space this holiday season -- the Royal Mail predicts £3.3bn worth of UK Xmas presents will be ordered online this year, while global e-tail tracker IMRG says UK November online shopping was up 44 percent year on year -- B2B, once heralded as where the real action would happen for e-commerce, is still lagging behind Joe Public in terms of acceptance of buying and selling in cyberspace?
Almost makes you want to go off and start a dot-com.
