Research firm eMarketer predicts that worldwide B2B ecommerce revenues will surpass US$ 1.4 trillion by end of 2003. In United States alone revenues will total US$ 721 billion. By 2004, US B2B ecommerce revenues are expected to reach US$ 1.01 trillion and studies show that a significant portion of these transactions will be conducted through emarketplaces.

What is an Emarketplace?

In a broader sense, business to business emarketplace is an online platform where buyers and sellers come to communicate, collaborate and make business transactions. Emarketplace caters a large number of participant companies as a community. The main objective of an emarketplace is to create a venue, filled with features that allow members to efficiently conduct significant portion of business processes on Net. Emarketplaces are also known as B2B exchanges.

Types of Emarketplaces

There are varieties of emarketplaces available on Internet to suit your company's specific need.

Public: These emarketplaces are open to all companies. Virtually, anybody can become a member and conduct business through these marketplaces.

Private: Membership is restricted and owners of marketplace decide according to which criteria they will select participants. For example: a large trading company can have its own emarketplace limited to its buyers or suppliers only.

Horizontal: If emarketplace works with a large numbers of products and services from different industries, it is called a horizontal marketplace.

Vertical: Industry specific emarketplaces are called vertical markets. An emarketplace, working solely with suppliers and buyers of cars is an example of this kind of marketplace.

Can your company benefit from an Emarketplace?

Whether you are primarily a buyer or a supplier, participation in emarketplace can generate enormous benefits to your company - both in cost savings and productivity increase.

Benefits that you can have as a buyer

Automate purchasing procedure Emarketplaces allow you to send request for quotes to a prospective supplier, receive quotes, send purchase orders and receive invoices within marketplace system. You can virtually consolidate all your procurement processes in one single place. This process of automation brings significant efficiency to you and saves your transaction processing cost. According to Aberdeen Group, a research company, thanks to B2B procurement systems, businesses can reduce these processing costs up to 70%.

Comparison shopping at its best Since you can see all suppliers of a particular product, that you are planning to buy, in one place, it is easy for you to see which one among suppliers suits you best in terms of quality, delivery time, geographical location, costs etc.

Reduce sourcing time cycle Most emarketplaces allow you to select multiple offers from different suppliers and create purchase orders in one shot and send. Since you handle all your procurement related correspondence from a consolidated working page, you can see right away answers to requests for quote, invoices, etc. This helps you react instantly and reduce you time in document processing.

Community participation You can receive valuable feedbacks from other fellow buyers, receive industry-related information, build new partnerships and use networking ability of a community.

Real time access to current product information Current information of a product is vital for an accurate buying decision. 24 hours access to supplier's catalog helps you getting most up-to-date information any time you need it.

Control rogue spending Consolidated and automated procurement and approval method stops maverick buying in a company.

Benefit that you can have as a seller

New sales channel By becoming a member of an emarketplace, you open a low cost, highly functional and easy-to-use sales channel for your company. You expose your company to a new targeted audience that otherwise would have been untapped to you.

Already a big slice of global trades are taking place through Internet. According to Forrester Research, a major marketing research company, worldwide online exports will escalate to US $1.4 trillion in 2004, and cross-border e-marketplace trade will exceed US $400 billion in this year alone.

However, cross-border trading will create a division between companies that actively import and export using Internet and those that don't. Companies that are slow in adopting Internet will loose competitive edge to more proactive Internet-savvy counter parts.

If you are already involved in international trade or planning to either import or export products, Internet could be your primary source of gathering data, researching prospective market, finding clients and, may be even, for doing your entire business online.

First, let’s look into export side of international trade. Like any other business, exporting requires proper planning. Well-documented and clearly written export marketing plan will work as your road map to success. The following steps are essential for any export endeavor. Identifying products for export

Although, in any given time you may find numerous products that qualify as exportable one, your chance for success will increase substantially if your chosen product met following criteria:

- You have been handling this product for local market for several years - You have full confidence in quality of product - The value of product matches or exceeds imported similar ones - You have guaranteed availability of this product for export

If you don’t have a product to export yet, and you are serious about export oriented business, consider checking out your local trade shows to seek out an exportable product.

Local online marketplaces are good options for finding products for export as well.

Identifying potential export markets for your products

To identify an export market you have to spend sometimes on gathering necessary information.

You will need export statistics of your country to see which markets are presently buying products similar to yours. This will give an idea which markets are viable for you to target. Apart from checking statistics from you own country, you also should verify export statistics from several other countries that manufacture and export similar products.

After analyzing this information, choose couple of markets for further assessment. This time you will need more in depth information on these markets. Doing market research

Market research is imperative in order to identify export potential of a product in a targeted country. There are two ways you can research your targeted market.

By getting first-hand information from targeted market