Background:
One of the greatest potentials of electronic marketplaces is in its ability to bring together buyers and sellers with greater effectiveness and at a scale that has been unprecedented. Buyers and sellers from all over the world may participate in trading relationships without temporal or spatial constraints. Indeed, real-world examples of successful online marketplaces -such as eBay- offer over millions of items for sale at any given time for anyone, from anywhere. Internet auctions are an interesting form of transactions that introduce new possibilities to different kind of businesses; for some of them this model of managing the transactions is sometimes preferable to traditional way of online buying as the participants feel that they are controlling the price of the product.
Motivation: Recently, there has been considerable growth of online auctions activities; however, what makes merchants adopt and use this model has not been researched deeply. There is a lot of information about the potential impact of this kind of commerce on businesses and the factors that lead to its adoption. Our main motivation on elaborating this project is to identify and elaborate a list of new opportunities that arise from business models based on electronic auctions. Below there are some examples of how some organizations have been taking advantage of it:
- Introduction of radically new products: The process of marketing research is accelerated by conducting the auction on-line.
- Managing Suppliers Relationships: To have a better deal from suppliers, many businesses, particularly those in the manufacturing industries, use the electronic auction model to obtain raw materials at the lowest possible price.
- Managing Surplus Production: The Web auction has been viewed as a tool for companies that fail to move their stock on time, by doing so they can sell their products at a reasonable price without exposing themselves or their brand, since online auctions allows them to maintain their anonymity or to distribute their products in another site.
- Perishables: To cases as seasonal products that are a marketing time bomb –as time passes by their value can disappear- electronic auctions offer the fluidity needed to reach an optimal price as zero hour approaches.
In our project, we will collect and analyze information about how these new ways of managing transactions online are helping some businesses to improve their operations or even to find better ways to increase their sales without losing control over the price and image of their offerings.
