ComputerWorld reports today that ebay's getting into the small-business emarketplace business.
Knock me over with a feather.
In the boom of 99-00, I spent a lot of time studying and working for clients who ran, participated in, or otherwise deified digital marketplaces, B2B exchanges, emarketplaces, e-commerce hubs, and any other name you want to give a genre of e-business that was ahead of its time or maybe never should have been at all.
Learning the difference between catalogs, auctions, reverse auctions, and real-time exchanges, learning the needs and preferences of buy-side and sell-side marketplace participants, learning the schematics of hubs, what made them tick, and ultimately why big business wasn't ready for them yet, was a study of technology and good ideas come too soon.
Procurement processes were vehemently hard-wired within big businesses, whose cast of procurers wasn't about to stop ordering goods the old fashioned way--even if that old way was as inefficient as faxing and phoning. Yes, supply chain efficiency was being embraced or at least given lip service to, but moving the trade of goods and services to an online marketplace was a big leap of faith to make.
In retrospect, making the grand leap into an online marketplace wasn't worth the potential return for most big businesses. Even if it meant those products would be cheaper and that they would arrive on time. Whether the "it" was paper clips or tractor engines, the leap looked pretty dangerous to the guys standing safely on the sideline. One reason for the lack of adoption was that trading in traditional procurement processes for participation in real-time exchanges dared to put a lot of jobs on the line. Usually the case when a business improves a process, whether that process hits only one link along the supply chain or traverses it.
This CFO article from 2001 explains a bushel of problems digital marketplaces began to come up against when the money-givers of the net began to shun the one-time darlings of e-commerce.
In the midst of it all, I watched a lot of really smart people and companies disappear. Some of the people I studied with then (and it was like going back to college) thought this was a pretty good idea when I had it nearly thee years ago. Unfortunately, it was an idea of many during a time when money was becoming scarce, even if ideas and dreams were getting cheaper.
The failure among businesses to adopt online marketplaces wasn't good news for me. Not for my dreams, not for a technology and business model I really thought could change the world. Not such good news for these guys either:
Ariba
Clarus
Idapta
...to name a few. These were all clients of mine, or competitors of clients, back then. VerticalNet is still around, but my how their language has changed!
They now provide collaborative supply chain solutions. Rather than use the word emarketplace, they now use lots of words to say the same thing. This, I guess, makes their customers less nervous: "Verticalnet is a leading provider of Collaborative Supply Chain solutions that provide customers and their trading partners the unmatched ability to see and manage spending, inventories, forecasts, plans, negotiations, contracts, orders and supplier performance so they can identify, realize and maintain savings across the extended supply chain."
Jokes on us?
The irony in all of this--or maybe it's not irony at all--is that in the time it took emarketplace companies to rise to stardom and fall off the planet, ebay's simple consumer-to-consumer auction model sailed along. Ebay has continued to turn consumers into businesses, and businesses into consumers. We're neither and both. We're just people who want to buy and sell stuff.
And now small businesses are people too on ebay.
Ebay's batch of small business marketplace participants are selling:
tractors and irrigation equipment
sensors, controls, and relays
disinfection, sterilization, and imaging equipment
motors, transmissions, and switches
and a whole lot more among the dozen industry marketplaces now represented there.
Ebay keeps erasing the boundaries for buying, selling, and trading anything online. It's cheaper. The specs are right. You get it fast. It's just what you needed. How much does it cost, can I get it by this date, how much if I buy 12, is it within tolerance? Sure.
Ebay was always closer to an exchange than anyone wanted to admit. Small businesses for now, but you know ebay.
All bets are off for how far they'll take it.
