Regardless B2B e-commerce ventures will form the backbone of the new economy, which, like the industrial revolution, isn’t going away. If the publicly traded B2Bs are failing now, it’s only because the real gems have yet to be mined and brought to their initial public offering, the biggest opportunities are still in the napkin stages.
Because it offers such tremendous opportunity for specialization and capitalization, business- to-business models can be broken into several distinct forms. First, B2Bs often called “market makers” by investors – serve either vertical or horizontal markets.
Vertical markets
Vertical markets are industry specific. E-commerce solutions in this category most frequently address the inefficiencies within a given industry, and hundreds of vertical market makers have already emerged in highly scattered, highly populated industries such as steel, chemicals, and paper.Horizontal markets
Horizontal markets span across multiple industries by offering common information, goods and services. They provided a venue for the transfer of goods, and services, including the outsourcing of basic services; data collection and analysis, human resources and general office operating supplies, to name a few.
Each of four additional types of B2Bs –
Online catalogs
Auctions
Community markets
Exchanges
-can fall within either the vertical or horizontal marketplaces.
Business to Business Model
