Australian B2B marketplaces have faced some major hurdles due to the insular strategies adopted by corporations driving the marketplaces rather than focusing on customers and a more global approach, according to one expert.
"With the exception of a few, Australian exchanges have been applied very much in a corporate dominant Australia-centric context," Oracle Vice President Marketing and Business Development Asia Pacific Chris Hummel said.
Some of the major difficulties creating a backlash amongst all the hype have been the ill-focus applied by the facilitators of B2B marketplaces.
"They are being driven by corporate interests, rather than any ground swell from below," Hummel said. "The exchanges are run by corporations focusing on own interests."
The focus for most facilitators has been exclusively on Australian only exchanges, according to Hummel.
"It has been blatantly obvious in global regions that cross border exchanges drive the critical mass," which is a dominant factor needed for the success of Australian exchanges.
The strategies taken by B2B exchanges have been to make an announcement of the exchange so as to establish a brand, and then build it.
However, this strategy is essentially trying to focus on benefits to investor or procurement organisation rather than value provisions to companies expected to trade through the exchange.
"It leaves out one major hole - what about the participant in this exchange. There are hundreds of companies trading, what's the value proposition to customers," Hummel said.
"If you don't focus on customers, you don't get them trading through the exchange, which means you don't get the critical mass, which is fundamentally valuable to an exchange."
Furthermore, organisations in the exchange will need to trade to a wider market, interacting between the three types of exchanges, which are vertical, horizontal and information markets.
"The mistake is that they think companies are only going to trade through one exchange, that they are going to be monogamous," Hammel said.
"The technology has to be integrated to allow them to link in to a number of exchanges."
