Requirements engineering
Reducing buyer search costs: implications for electronic marketplaces
Management Science - Special issue: Frontier research on information systems and economics
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
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Over the past decade an extraordinary increase has been experienced in the practice of B2B online trading. Portals, hubs, brokerages, and in particular electronic marketplaces (e-marketplaces) have emerged as everyday channels for business trading. The decision process behind joining such an e-marketplace, and evaluating which particular ones offer the best mix of services for a particular business's requirements, is not a straightforward undertaking. There are a host of variants on offer, numerous different membership schemes, service ranges, functionality types, product ranges, and technology platforms in existence, so it can prove to be a very confusing process for any prospective company contemplating joining. In earlier work (Hopkins and Kehoe 2006) an interrelationship matrix-based method was developed for evaluating, and rating, the appropriateness of a range of services offered by e-marketplaces in comparison with specific customer requirements. The system was designed to be used not only for evaluating existing e-marketplaces, but also in assisting with the design of new ones, and was intended be of equal value to both buyers and sellers. This paper now describes how the developed system has been tested, in two case study environments, in order to gauge its suitability for e-marketplace evaluation at both component level and sector level.