There are marketplace specialists including Ariba, Clarus, Commerce One, Intelisys Electronic Commerce, Trilogy Software and Time , a Perot Systems business. Plus, vertical exchanges have cropped up for virtually every industry. Each vendor makes money by marrying buyers with sellers, but how they assess fees varies. Ariba, for example, charges per transaction, but the company and its buyers keep the fee a closely guarded secret. The attraction to sellers is increased access, far beyond traditional sales methods and even farther beyond what their existing network infrastructures can handle, says Dave Reinke, vice president at Braun Consulting, a Chicago marketplace consultant, which helped create BidBuyBuild. com, a marketplace for the construction industry.
Marketplaces also vary in how they process transactions.
Some, such as Ariba, do the processing on their networks, inside their own firewalls, and others, such as Clarus, put that task in the users hands. But, he says, Clarus doesn t process the transaction itself. While your company today would need to join two separate digital marketplaces a horizontal one to procure office supplies and a vertical one to buy raw materials expectations are that these two worlds will soon merge. Horizontal digital marketplaces have begun to set themselves up to offer vertical exchanges as a subset of their existing sites. To narrow down the choices, start by assessing the number of transactions your company will complete each month.