A platform for business-to-business sell-side, private exchanges and marketplaces

Abstract

E-commerce, in terms of the monetary value of transactions, is heavily skewed business-to-business (B2B) commerce. Numerous B2B sites are already in existence, providing a fairly rich set of functionality for enabling simple or sophisticated trading of goods and services. In the coming years, we expect a strong growth in many kinds of B2B sites for trading, procurement, and sales. In this paper, we present a B2B platform suitable for various kinds of businesses such as large sellers, dealers, distributors, private exchanges, marketplaces, and procurement hubs. We present business scenarios, describe our design criteria, and present the architecture for the B2B platform. We discuss two major IBM offerings within the WebSphere® Commerce Suite product-WebSphere Commerce Suite, Marketplace Edition (MPE) and WebSphere Commerce Business Edition (BE)-that are based on this platform. We also present some experiences with and deployment of MPE for private exchanges and marketplaces.