InformationWeek

s companies move their supply-chain and customer-relationship-management processing to the Internet, they're looking at E-marketplaces as viable channels for commerce and customer interaction. E-marketplaces present tremendous opportunities for them to expand their sales channels and reduce overall supply-chain costs.

While there's been heavy fallout in the marketplace arena this year, especially with the large public exchanges, a handful of private, vendor-driven exchanges continue to prosper by attracting customers and business partners.

This may speak to participants' desire to work with a single, major supplier for their initial foray into the world of online marketplaces. As participants become more comfortable with online trade and as the integration challenges become more routine, maybe we'll again see a variety of public and private marketplaces. But for now, the issues surrounding enterprise integration and partner collaboration remain substantial hurdles.

Another problem is that many marketplace hosts offer sites that are decidedly buyer-focused. By not catering to sellers, or at least making it easier for sellers to sell through marketplaces, market makers may actually inhibit E-business. While buyer-focused sites are great, a lack of suppliers will make an E-marketplace less attractive to buyers--and without a significant aggregation of buyers, a marketplace can't provide sellers with the liquidity they seek. When the technical hurdles of connecting your business systems with those of the marketplace are factored in, you find that many suppliers are reluctant to sell through E-marketplaces.

Sellers need the ability to get their catalog content--data about their products and services, such as product name, description, stock-keeping unit, colors, sizes, prices--onto whatever E-marketplace they choose. Meanwhile, market makers need the ability to consolidate catalog data from multiple suppliers into a unified presentation for buyers.

What sellers, market makers, and buyers need is catalog syndication, which refers to the ability of suppliers to easily share their catalog data with multiple marketplaces and for marketplaces to easily aggregate catalog data from multiple suppliers. Catalog syndication is key to removing many of the hurdles that make sellers hesitant to invest time and money in marketplace strategies and partnerships.

Marketplace operators typically consolidate product information from all of their sellers into a common catalog, giving buyers a deep product selection. Each seller takes on the responsibility of feeding the marketplace with updated catalog data--information that can change on a weekly or even daily basis.

What's more, a seller's data is often a compilation of multiple inputs, such as data from the seller's internal systems, original equipment manufacturers, business partners, and other suppliers that may be included in the seller's own catalog. When it comes to syndication with marketplaces, sellers may also choose to syndicate applications as well as catalog content. For example, sellers can syndicate applications or logic for dynamic pricing, inventory availability checking, and logistics.

There are a number of benefits to syndication for sellers. Syndication lets sellers provide catalog data to multiple E-marketplaces without having to reorganize their product taxonomy for each marketplace. In addition, syndication lets companies leverage a common catalog across multiple distribution mechanisms, including traditional print channels. The key is to make sure that the data is updated and shared with syndication partners on a regular basis so it's always current.

For sellers, content syndication is a three-step process, which today must be repeated for each E-marketplace in which the seller participates:

Step one involves building and testing the data translation. Once the seller aggregates all the information it wishes to syndicate into a common catalog, the seller and the marketplace operator must collaborate to establish a translation from the seller's data format into the operator's format. From there, the data translation must be tested for accuracy. During this discovery process, the seller has an opportunity to assess the completeness of its data sources, fill in the holes, and make modifications as needed.

Step two is the translation of the data. Once the translation has been established and tested, the seller converts its catalog-content data into the operator's format. This process is regularly repeated to provide updated information to the E-marketplace, and it can be automated if catalog content-translation software is being used. Data is then transmitted to the operator electronically through E-mail or file transfer.