B2B Exchanges Analysis of the Three Types

B2B Exchanges

Analysis of the Three Types of Business-to-Business Exchanges

There are three types of exchanges that are prevalent in business-to-business (B2B) in seller and buyer relations incouding New Buyer, Modified Rebuy and Straight Rebuy (Coupey, 2005). It is the goal of this analysis to evaluate each of these exchanges and explain their unique advantages. All exchanges share a commonality of catalog management, order capture, quoting, pricing and Web infrastructure support. The process workflows vary for New Buyer, Modified Rebuy and Straight Rebuy. All are integrated into the underlying IT platform through the use of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and role-based access to the specific systems of record and databases (Li, Jhang-Li, 2011).

A New Buy exchange is constructed to encompass the core functionality of comparable sell-side trading exchanges, with the specific goal of enabling as many transactions with new customers as possible (Coupey, 2005). The New Buy exchange is constructed to provide as much information and knowledge to the prospective customer as possible. Modified Rebuy exchanges are constructed to capitalize on previous intelligence and insight into customers' requirements and needs (Coupey, 2005). The foundation for communication and platform for communicating with customers is the Internet in this exchange (Coupey, 2005). This type of exchange is also nuanced from the standpoint of tailoring the user interface to support specific preferences, needs and wants of the customer (Coupey, 2005) (Porterfield, Bailey, Evers, 2010). The last type of exchange, the Straight Rebuys, is predicated on selling commodity-like products which require little differentiation apart from price and availability (Coupey, 2005). The Straight Rebuy scenario is also highly automated in many industries, including the use of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) technologies to standardize the transaction and its command set as much as possible (Coupey, 2005). The intent of the Straight Rebuy is to make the transactions as seamless and frictionless as possible, leading to significant buyer loyalty over time.