The roles of electronic marketplace for buyer-supplier relationship: collaborative system architecture

As the most widely used media of BtoB e-business, the e-Marketplace (EM) can play an important role in the age of c-commerce (collaborative commerce). In supply chain management (SCM) area, the relationship-based collaboration among partners has shown great efficiency. Although the collaboration is important in both areas of EM and SCM there has been a critical difference in the selection of trade partners between them. In this paper, the EM's collaborative stages for integration with its customer system are reviewed and a system architecture is proposed for EM's electronic functional role within the perspective of collaborative commerce and buyer-supplier relationship. The relationship-based BtoB commerce through EM is reviewed to explain that it can be more beneficial than the commerce based on the price competitive selection of trade partners. With the proposed system architecture, an EM can be the functional medium for the collaborative IOIS system architecture.