Grow your Business with Emarketplace Part III

Increase Company Productivity

After years of hard work, finally your business started to pick nup. You are selling more products then ever! You have lined up a ngood number of suppliers and buyers. Things have never been better nthan now. Except one thing! With rising sales your overhead and nsupply chain expenses are also sky-rocketing. Your profit margin nis no longer the same as it used to be! You feel that you are in na limbo! How to increase productivity? How to cut costs without ngiving up sales?

Sounds familiar to you? Well, your company is not alone! According nto IDC, a research firm, while interviewed, overwhelming majority nof the company executives claimed that their biggest concern is ndeclining profit margins.

Companies, in order to stay competitive, must find solutions to nincrease efficiency in business operations and control costs. Is nthere a solution to this ubiquitous problem?

Remember Dorothy from the children classic “Wizard of the Oz”?
She had to go through numerous obstacles in her quest to find a nway to get back to Kansas, her home. Only to find out that the nsilver shoes that she was wearing from the very first day since nthe cyclone brought her to the Land of Oz could have taken her nback home, all she had to do was to knock the heels together nthree times and command the shoes to carry her wherever she nwished to go.

Similar to this story, solutions to these corporate problems are nwidely available right under your nose, only you as a company nexecutive have to overcome the fear of new technologies and adopt nthem to your own good.

B2B exchanges or emarketplaces are capable of solving many key nproblems that corporations are facing today. Emarketplaces can nprovide immense opportunities to automate supply chain process, nincrease operational efficiency, reduce overhead costs and expand nmarket at a minimal cost.

Using emarketplace effectively
Two primary factors of company productivity are Revenue Increase nand Cost Cutting. Both are achievable if a company seriously ndecides to incorporate emarketplace features in all aspects of nbusiness operations. That means if as a company you want to reap nall the benefits of emarketplaces, you have to commit yourself nseriously.

Become a member
Once you find an emarketplace that suits your requirement, the nfirst thing what you have to do is to register and become a member.
Most emarketplaces have different membership packages. Although, nto check out the emarketplace – whether it is viable for your nbusiness or not – you might start with the free membership package, nbut once you are satisfied with your selection, to use the nemarketplace to your advantage you should choose the package with nmost features and functions.

Integrate your products to e-catalog
If you are a supplier, this is a very important step to take.
Unless you have thousands of products to sell, this should not nbe a difficult task. All emarketplaces use either a form or nwizard-based, not-so-complex and user-friendly product adding ntool. Since e-catalogs that emarketplaces use are industry nstandard, once you aggregated you products, same information you nwill be able to use in other e-catalogs, emarketplaces and even nin your own website.

Apart from your own buyers other prospective customers from the nemarketplace community are able to view your products in the ne-catalog, which in turn will bring you new contacts and sales.

Create products for sale offers
You should create sales offer of your primary products that you ncarry most of the time and post them on the emarketplace. Many nemarketplaces have options to sell products with different nprocedures. You can make offer to sell access inventories through ndynamic market, also called auction, you can make hot offers nwith time limit, etc.
This is an extra sales channel in the beginning, which might grow ninto your primary one!

Involve your buyers and sellers
If you would like to use an emarketplace most effectively, younhave to get your suppliers and buyers on board too. Supply chain nmanagement solution that usually comes with an emarketplace nallows you to reduce operational costs significantly.nn- Encourage your buyers to send request for quote for a product nthrough the inbuilt system of the emarketplace. nn- Make strict rules within your company to send all quotes nexclusively through emarketplace.nn- Ask your buyers to send Purchase Orders to your company via nemarketplace.nn- Bill all your clients using invoicing system of the emarketplace.nn- Manage shipping and handling though emarketplaces.nn- Convince your suppliers to use the same emarketplace so that neven as a buyer you can get the benefits of a B2B exchange.

Complete adoption of an emarketplace will help a company gain nnumerous benefits. The following figures taken from various nresearch notes emphasize the importance of e-marketplace in ntoday’s business world. nn- Thanks to emarketplace, companies can reduce purchase norder processing cost from US $75 to less tha
US $10.nn- By automating sales and customer support processes companies ncan lower overhead costs up to 25 – 30% easily.nn- Companies also can reduce more than five percent of their nmaintenance, repair and operation by incorporating e-business nsolutions, which are integral parts of any emarketplace.nn- Business process automation using B2B emarketplace helps ncompanies decreasing of document errors from 20 percent to nless than one percent.

B2B Emarketplace solutions are great opportunities

The famous inventor Thomas Edison once told, “Opportunity is nmissed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and nlooks like work.”

Company executives are by no means afraid of hard work, but nunfortunately many of them have colossal fear of high ntechnology and because of this reluctant to explore new
Internet-based technologies to their advantage. If you are none of them, be assured that knowledge required to adopt nemarketplace to your business and manage it properly is easy nto learn and implement.