E-marketplaces must also be able to support businesses of all sizes, both large and small. That means providing hosted buying and selling applications for small and medium sized companies that might not have the resources or IT infrastructure to deploy these applications in-house. E-marketplaces must be capable of completing a wide range of commercial transactions online in real time. A buyer must be able to check pricing and availability, and sellers must be able to receive orders and generate invoices. The system must be able to handle change orders, confirmations, RFQs, EFTs and many other transaction types .
Commercial transactions are just the beginning.
To truly be competitive, industrial e-marketplaces will have to effectively integrate supply chain management, including collaborative planning and design. In the future there will be thousands of e-marketplaces, and the greatest liquidity will flow through those that are interconnected. An automaker, for example, might create a private exchange for its dealerships, then connect to an industry exchange for trade with its supply chain. At the same time, it might connect to a regional exchange, let's say in Singapore, for parts from a foreign supplier, and to other industry exchanges for commodities such as oil and gas, or metals. The end result is a network effect of global proportions.