If you are a small to medium size company and selling or planning to sell products and services over the Internet and still did not try out e-Marketplace, you are simply loosing a great business opportunity!

China has already become the world factory to produce low / medium class products for western world. There are increasing trading activities and volume between east and west. The buyers and suppliers need a channel to search target products and business partners. Moreover they require to communicate and trade online directly and conveniently. e-Marketplace appears to be a crucial and effective platform for those trading activities.

What is an e-Marketplace?
In a broader sense, business to business (B2B) e-Marketplace is an online platform where buyers and suppliers come to communicate, collaborate and make business transactions. e-Marketplace caters a large number of participant companies as a community. The main objective of an e-Marketplace is to create a venue, filled with features that allow members to efficiently conduct significant portion of business processes on the Net. e-Marketplaces are also known as B2B trade exchanges. Whether you are primarily a buyer or a supplier, participation in e-Marketplace can generate enormous benefits to your company - both in cost savings and productivity increase.

Buyers' Benefits
Automate the purchasing procedure
e-Marketplace allow you to send ask for quotes to a prospective supplier, receive quotes, send enquiries, receive enquiries, send purchase orders and receive invoices within the e-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 the suppliers of a particular product, that you are planning to buy, in one place, it is easy for you to see which one among the suppliers suits you best in terms of price, quality, delivery time, geographical location, costs etc.

Reduce sourcing time cycle
You can easily use the search features and browse the products from different industry categories on the e-Marketplace platform. Since most of them employ sophisticated IT technologies to enable users spot the target buying or selling trade leads and products quickly and effectively.

Reduce back-n-forth time with various parties
Most e-Marketplaces 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 the networking ability of a community.

Access to trade leads and products' information
Current information of trade leads and products 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.

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

Low customer acquisition cost
Your mere presence in the e-Marketplace might bring you new customers. Since the buyers come to e-Marketplace themselves your cost of getting customers through this channel is relatively low in comparison to other traditional channels.

Improve customer service
Ability to have constant interaction through the e-Marketplace allows you to serve your customers better. You can track the whole ordering process from payment to delivery and bring greater efficiency in customer service. e-Marketplace provider will ensure the platform and service are uninterrupted. So your existing and potential clients can always communicate with you.

Efficient information sharing method
When needed, you can instantly update your catalog and inform your customers about changes. Whether you are launching a new product or having a web seminar, through e-Marketplace you can share the information more efficiently.

You may ask, if participation in an e-Marketplace is so beneficial, why companies are not flocking to e-Marketplaces.

The slower adoption can be blamed on various inadvertent factors:

	Many companies had fall short to generate significant sales from their own websites and look at e-Marketplaces with a dose of skepticism. But as studies show ecommerce endeavors fail, mainly, due to lack of proper planning and marketing, as many marketing / sales managers take the attitude that build-it-and-they-will-come.
	Many conservative suppliers claim that their business depends on close relationship with local buyers. In reality, you can also get access to local untapped market through e-Marketplaces. Another aspect - you can bring efficiency to your business by co-adopting an e-Marketplace along with your buyers.
	Many elderly executives are not very tech-savvy and afraid of adopting new technologies considering them too complex. In reality, e-business is virtual implementation of real life business processes and not very difficult to embrace.
	Fear of price shopping by buyers is another factor, why suppliers are reluctant to use e-Marketplaces. The ability of e-Marketplace to emphasize all characteristics of the product in product content and demonstrate buyer-specific pricing should eliminate this fear.
	Many, mistakenly, consider that participation cost in e-Marketplace is very high and will hurt their bottom line. The expenses related to e-Marketplace membership are, usually, a mere fraction of what you can save from the use of its different features.

What features that e-Marketplace must have?
As an online venue, where participants expect to conduct substantial part of their business processes, e-Marketplace has a large range of useful features:

	Product catalog based on an industry category system
	Product search capability within the marketplace and e-catalog
	Buyers and sellers search capabilities
	Supply chain process, i.e. request for quote, quotation, purchase order, billing system, etc.
	Companies Directory Listing
	Features of adding, editing or deleting products
	Features of posting Offers
	Ability to advertise and promote products with special offers, sales, and discount
	Direct communication with business partners
	Trading Services for traders