But we were all being a little naive about how B2B e-markets would take off. Transaction fees are the primary means of getting paid in e-markets, and they are at best around 5 percent or so. They have developed their own e-market consortia working with other players in their own industries. In March, April and May of 2000, consortia e-markets were formed in the automotive, aerospace, forest products, utilities, food, airline, rail, energy, chemicals, hospitality and computer industries. I suspect it will scare many independent e-markets into selling themselves or their services to consortia.
Integration is a huge issue in e-markets.
It refers to the ability of one company to integrate its buying and selling systems with those of the e-market, or with other companies that are participating in the market. Eventually, companies will undoubtedly be able to issue purchase orders through their own enterprise systems, and have them seamlessly pass through an e-market to the enterprise system of another company. The difficulty of implementing information and process standards. But it is another matter altogether for everybody in an industry to actually implement common information and processes. That would mean reengineering an awful lot of businesses.