نقش مزایده های اینترنت در گسترش بازارهای B2B
کد مقاله | سال انتشار | تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی |
---|---|---|
23463 | 2002 | 8 صفحه PDF |
Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)
Journal : Industrial Marketing Management, Volume 31, Issue 2, February 2002, Pages 103–110
چکیده انگلیسی
In the wake of the advent of the World Wide Web, businesses are scrambling to take advantage of changes in their markets. While the consumer side of the Web explosion has been much touted, it is the business-to-business (B2B) market that has quietly surpassed expectations. An important business model that is responsible for this new market expansion is the Internet or Web auction. Businesses are adapting traditional auctions to the instantaneous “real-time” advantage of the Net to reach new markets that were previously cost-prohibitive by reducing transaction costs. Advantages such as the size and scope of the audience are giving Internet auctions a major role in the emerging global economy. This article examines the enormous impact of Internet auctions on B2B markets. We look at the kinds of auctions being conducted and their relevance to emerging business paradigms. We examine the circumstances under which you choose to conduct Web auctions and their impact on pricing mechanisms, information asymmetries, and channel relationships.
مقدمه انگلیسی
The Internet, as a medium of exchange, has only come into its own in the past 5 years. When the Internet initially appeared on the horizon, few realized that the new medium was on its way to changing the way consumers and businesses buy and sell products in a global environment and set prices in these transactions. With the growth of the Internet in the past several years, businesses have rapidly become aware of its potential impact and the need to adapt their entire strategies to take advantage of this potential. New institutions have emerged to make use of this new medium. One way businesses have adapted to the global marketplace of the Internet has been to reengineer the way they do business. Intranets, extranets, and business Web sites are being developed to help companies cope with the expanding marketplace. Information technology and knowledge management have moved into the mainstream of business processes to help facilitate the communications effort necessary in this new era. The development of sophisticated software that enables businesses to buy and sell on the Internet under secure conditions has led to new strategies suited to this medium and the emergence of new business models. A business model that is increasingly being used by businesses for transactions with one another is the Internet or Web auction. Web auctions, as a new way to buy and sell, have surpassed expectations for efficiently carrying out intermediate transactions in business-to-business (B2B) markets. Online auctions connect buyers and sellers together in ways that were previously not possible. Businesses can communicate their needs to a global audience in real time and cut transaction costs in the process. New relationships can be developed with suppliers who were previously inaccessible and relationships that are no longer necessary may be severed. Web auctions can cut costs substantially by increasing competition. Web auctions have proved to be particularly popular for industrial procurement. In the US, it has been estimated that as much as US$0.35 of every dollar or US$5 trillion dollars goes to the procurement of industrial parts each year [1]. Traditional methods to elicit bids in an industrial procurement exchange require extensive time and effort. After a lengthy request for quotes (RFQ) process, a business was satisfied if it managed to get a good price from suppliers. The market for the RFQ was usually small and local, leading to inefficiencies in the process. One factor contributing to the RFQ process being inefficient was the lack of standardization in the request itself. Unlike when products are homogeneous, it is difficult to compare prices when the specifications of a job or purchase opportunity are not the same. A business usually relied on straight rebuy transactions and stayed with one or two main suppliers with whom they had dealt successfully in the past in order to reduce transaction costs for most of their procurement needs. Occasionally, in modified rebuy situations, they might look at one or two newcomers per transaction to avoid becoming too dependent on one supplier. Online Internet or Web auctions, however, permit businesses to reach suppliers on a global basis in real time without incurring the costs traditionally associated with such access. While estimates of the volume of online B2B transactions vary, Forrester Research suggests that B2B e-commerce will reach US$3.5 trillion by the year 2004 [2]. Industry analysts predict that 25% of this e-commerce will consist of exchanges engineered by Web auctions. The proliferation of Web auctions in B2B markets in the past 2 years attests to the fact that Internet markets are well suited to the auction format for conducting transactions between organizations. In order to look at why Web auctions have become so popular for many businesses, we briefly review some rudimentary details of auctions and their pros and cons in the B2B context.
نتیجه گیری انگلیسی
The establishment of Web auctions as a tool to facilitate exchanges between buyers and suppliers is emerging as a new business paradigm. This article has examined a few of the far reaching aspects of this model, but many interesting aspects of B2B Web auctions remain to be studied. By using new technology, companies and industries that have used standard auctions are now turning to the Web to increase their market. Web auctions of products like livestock and flowers are using sophisticated video techniques to display the product being offered for sale. The world is indeed becoming smaller when you think of how the Internet has affected all aspects of commerce. The differences between standard auctions and Web auctions are many and varied. There is no actual physical place in a Web auction. A Web auction also ends differently. There are many ways to extend or end the bidding with extra time allotted for tied bids being the most popular. Increasing the time allotted could affect the outcome of the auction by allowing last-minute bidders to enter the game. No matter how you look at it, B2B Web auctions are the wave of the future. Web auctions will be analyzed until the questions answered by traditional economic theory are answered in the virtual world. The next few years will show us the types of auction that survive, the industries where they will play an important role, those that will be controlled by suppliers, those controlled by buyers, and those where new specialist intermediaries will emerge. It will show us clearly which new business paradigms are here to stay.