E-Business Technologies in E-Market Literature

Introduction

According to the 2005 report of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD, 2005), e-commerce continues to grow in all sectors. In the United States (the largest e-commerce market), e-commerce is still most prominent in manufacturing and wholesale trade, but on the other hand, growth rates are highest in retail trade (B2C) and services. In the United States, the largest global e-commerce market, e-commerce sales have continuously grown during the last years. With a growth rate (24.7%) significantly higher than for total retail trade (4.3%), the share of e-commerce in total retail trade is also growing. The latest available figures indicate that its share has more than doubled (UNCTAD, 2005). Eurostat data (http://www.emarketservices.com) has listed, until January 2006, about 905 e-markets from various business sectors. E-markets aim to facilitate information exchange and support activities related to business process management and transactions. They are characterized by a frictionless and very low-cost flow of information between buyers and sellers. Moreover, they allow sellers to reach a wider consumer base, and buyers to have access to a large number of sellers. E-markets are therefore expected to create economic value for buyers, sellers, market intermediaries, and for society as a whole (Bakos, 1998; Grieger, 2003).

In e-markets, proposed technologies and solutions vary from simple online catalogues that provide more information about products to interested customers, to sophisticated collaborative project management and supply-chain-management environments (Dai & Kauffman, 2002b). They address various technical topics, such as architectures, interoperability, services, protocols, data management, and networking. Nevertheless, there has not been, so far, a comprehensive overview of the technologies proposed, the dimensions addressed, or the solutions tested. This chapter aims to cover this aspect by providing a blueprint of research literature and e-business technologies for e-markets.

An attempt to review and classify published research in this field can be an interesting and useful contribution to e-business researchers, managers, and practitioners/implementers. It can answer questions such as the following: which technical topics attract more attention in the field of e-markets? What are the proposed technologies and solutions? What are possible future directions of their development? Within this context, the aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of recent technological contributions in the field of e-markets. More specifically, it reports results from a study of e-market research that has been published during the past decade in scientific journals. The results provide interesting insight about the technologies for e-business processes in e-market environments, and outline implications for practice and research.

The chapter is structured as follows. The “Background” section provides some background on e-markets, as well as an overview of relevant studies. “Methodology” presents the methodology followed in order to identify and classify e-market literature around technical topics. “Results” presents and discusses the results of the classification and reviews representative contributions. Finally, “Conclusion” provides the conclusions of this study and outlines some implications for related research.