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Bringing buyers and sellers together

The logical development of any electronic community is to use your contact and communication with your community members to develop electronic trading. Both open and sector or interest group e-trading is emerging as the way to do business in the future.

There is now a well-honed distinction between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) internet applications.

• B2C is characterised by open sites in which many buyers and single or few vendors trade through single step transactions. Internet implementation is based on catalogue technology and payments systems.
• B2B may involve only a few buyers and even fewer suppliers but operating in a multi-step (A sells to B sells to C), or multi-vendor (A and B combine to sell to C) supply transactions. Internet implementation here uses advanced e-procurement systems to maximise productivity at low cost. (See the page on Supply Chain Communities for the further development of market-making technology.)
• B2B and B2C trading mechanisms also include malls, auctions and exchanges, sometimes called B2B2C applications. These are simply different ways of bringing the interests of buyers and sellers together in order to make trades.

All electronic trading methods aim to reduce costs and increase productivity for vendors while making purchasing easier for buyers. The challenge for any entrepreneur or professional group is to grasp the opportunities early to maintain competitive advantage. All it needs is someone with drive and enthusiasm to champion the future and promote this new way of doing business to a community of interest.

MAINHighway supports your trading infrastructure

With Main Highway as your technology partner you can assure yourself that your entrepreneurship is well supported by our experience and skill.

The core technologies required for market solutions are:

• Guest buyer registration and name and address capture
• Catalogue solutions for multi-vendor product display
• Exchange solutions for price and model comparisons
• Auction solutions for fast moving price critical markets
• Access to our database technology for vendor and purchaser record handling
• Advanced tools such as PurchasePoint and SupplyPoint to develop B2B or B2B2C trading support systems
• Our TollWay purchasing and payments clearance system
• Our treasury handling service to expedite payments

In addition market communities hosted by Main Highway obtain

• Content development support, knowledge management and web authoring.
• Widespread promotion across our community of like-minded businesses offering "fast-start" trading opportunities.
• A presence within, and promotion into, a community of communities dedicated to making e-business happen.

Solutions in partnership:
The Main Highway extranet community is actively working with a number of commercial partners in the development of "dot com" markets, using our technology to create new electronic marketplaces with them. We are always seeking new opportunities.

We perform a marketing, commercial and competitive analysis as part of our investigations. We are willing to work as an "arms length" technology provider, a partner with a revenue share and as equity partners. Each project is considered on its commercial merits.

Implementation is becoming faster as more experience is gained in these new commercial areas. We bring our experience to your business area and can offer substantial savings in development costs where our generic technology platform can be adopted.

If you are wanting to build a market community on the internet, contact us. It is useful to have a short executive summary of your idea at an early stage. Our experience could save you a lot of time and effort. Contact us now.

Home

e-market solutions

Capturing your visitors

Catalogue solutions

Product Data handling

Transaction handling

Enabling payments

Treasury Handling

Content Support Services

Cross-community promotion and marketing

Exchange Case Study

The market for electric motor drives and controls is being serviced by MAINHighway through its alliance with ElectraMotaControl.com.

Here, vendors can display model types and their specifications in a common format to a constituency of professional buyers.

Latest pricing information is made available to subscribers while other content of interest assures repeated visits to the marketplace.