Its Commercial Products Group sells brand-name products, such as Folgers coffee, to businesses, such as food service companies. The commercial products market is larger than retail, but fragmented and filled with small businesses. This makes it ideal for marketplaces, says Charles Michael, the group's global e-business director. It has licensed I-many's technology to do so, Michael says. A lot of the exchanges today focus on auctions and reverse auctions.
Most commercial markets are contract-oriented.
When using an e-marketplace, participants will negotiate online, and have those messages documented. The e-marketplace can host its own contract negotiation application or, through integration software, tap into those hosted by partners. Workflow should also include after-contract items such as routing approvals of purchase orders. This may be a capability of a transaction engine or it could be running on its own development platform, such as TradeMatrix by i2 Technologies. Evaluating a marketplace's transaction engine is much simpler.