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Conducting Business through B2B E-marketplaces
Businesses, which are still sitting on sidelines and not doing business on the Internet, should think seriously about their position! If you are one of them, chances are there, that you have to pay dearly for your indecision as you might lose significant market share to your more proactive competitors in a very short period of time.
Apart from the fact that e-commerce is growing at the rate of more than 25 percent a year, the use of online features can bring efficiency to virtually every aspect of business process, be it supply chain management or customer support management.
But, how can you build an e-commerce business and take advantages of all these great possibilities' After all, you are pretty sure that anything to do with new technology is complicated, time-consuming, and expensive.
Believe it or not, this is just a misconception that most business owners have about the Internet technology. The truth is ' in order to run a business online and reap profits, like any new effort, you need to do a little homework, have patience and determination, and get going.
Take the following steps seriously and in no time you will be able to embrace fascinating world of online business.
Take your products online
Getting your product online does not simply mean - having a nice picture and a product narration to go with it. Effective use of the Internet is based on standards. Standards, as you know, are created to facilitate common use of a technology. If you ever imported or exported a product or service, or if you registered your product with some kind of authorities ever; you certainly know that each product falls under certain subcategory according to the classification system that you encountered. Internet is the same thing. Since the emergence of Internet, several classification systems have been developed.
If you think long term and would like to use same catalog with multiple e-marketplaces, you should adopt one of the prevailing classification system in the Internet. The best online catalog classification available from my point of view is UNSPSC. For one thing, many prominent e-marketplaces adopted this particular system, which allows you to post your products on multiple e-procurement systems and e-marketplaces.
How do you do this' I would suggest you to become a member of one of the e-marketplaces, where you can aggregate your products using some kind of simple wizards or forms. E-marketplaces based on Commerce One's the largest B2B e-marketplace enabler, have this facility.
Our own Rusbiz e-catalog system, which is also based on UNSPSC, also allows you to integrate your products using a very simple but sophisticated form. If you do not have time to do it by your own, you can use the service of a B2B exchange. Rusbiz also provides with similar service.
Get an online presence
What should be your next step once you have all your products transformed into e-catalog' Naturally, you need to have an online presence to sell the products. There are number of options how to do this.
Become a member of an e-marketplace
3 POINT BLANK LINKING FORMULAS!1) COMMUNITY TOGETHERNESS Allow other web sites to use your online community for their web site visitors. Just have them link .....
This could be a large geography oriented fairly large horizontal market or a vertical e-marketplace specific to your industry. The membership fees are in most of the cases not so expensive. But many of them charge some percentage on your transactions, usually, from 1 to 3 percent. If you expect big sales volume, you may think this might not be the best choice for you. However, if you get new customers, thanks to your mere presence in an e-marketplace, the percentage that you ......
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