How to Build an E-Procurement Marketplace: Technologies and Modules
What Is E-Procurement Marketplace?
Using e procurement marketplace today has become a popular format for any government or commercial procurement. The development of information technology is currently taking place at such a rapid pace that the state and business should take this into account. E procurement portal allows users to get all the necessary information on one site, participate in electronic trading, quickly sell the product or service or get it. This is the reason for the demand for procurement management system.
Automated procurement system has a huge number of advantages over conventional, paper-based operations. First of all, it is transparency and high profitability. In addition, it is possible to significantly reduce the costs of potential suppliers to participate in procurement. There is no need for permanent notarization of documents and the supplier can participate in procurement without leaving the office, spending money for sending applications and personal presence that was previously necessary. Secondly, e procurement solutions make it possible to bring the transparency of the procurement process to a new level. Now, thanks to procurement marketplace, suppliers can view the offers of competitors, which guarantee equal opportunities for all participants. The application of this principle prevents various illegal frauds in the form of collusion between the participants, and makes the administrative pressure from the customer impossible.
Top 5 Procurement Marketplaces You Precisely Know
Amazon.com is the largest online trading platform, comparable in popularity only to the eBay auction, which sells and purchases tens of thousands of various products every day. The main site of the company operates in the US. In addition, the company also has divisions in France, England, Germany, Canada, China and Japan. Initially created for the sale of only books, Amazon grew into a giant trading platform with a huge variety of products from fishing rods to guitars and from auto parts to designer handbags.
Screenshot of Amazon Procurement Marketplace
Etsy.com is a trading platform, which was created in 1995, and united creative people from all over the world. Throughout its existence, Etsy has attracted hundreds and thousands of outstanding creative people who have turned their extraordinary abilities into real money. The variety of items displayed on Etsy.com, most often made by hands, is amazing. There are jewelry, knitted clothes, personal care products, home interior items, paintings of little-known artists, photographs of novice photographers, magnificent earthenware, and unique masterpieces from ordinary wood.
Screenshot of Etsy E Procurement Marketplace
EBay is the largest online auction in the world. Here you can always find a huge range of various products: from food to cars, and sometimes even to incredible curiosities. So, one day, William Shakespeare’s manuscript “Prince of Tire”, survived from the Great Fire of London in 1666, was sold on this site. The price of the deal was more than impressive and constitute 5 million pounds sterling.
Screenshot of eBay Marketplace
The international procurement system AliExpress is a popular place for electronic commerce between Chinese suppliers and buyers. A web resource can be compared to a giant market where sales transactions are made online. AliExpress is a great opportunity for sellers to export products from China to other countries, foreign buyers appreciate the platform for the fact that the site eliminates the need to look for Chinese suppliers on their own and a host of problems related to the delivery and payment of goods from abroad.
Screenshot of AliExpress E Procurement Marketplace
Prozorro is a supply chain management software, the use of which is mandatory for all Ukrainian government customers when purchasing goods and services for large amounts. It won the prestigious international award in the field of public procurement World Procurement Awards 2016.
Screenshot of Etsy eCommerce Marketplace
Classification of E-Procurement Applications
There are several classifications of e procurement applications. Firstly, it is possible to distinguish the following types of marketplaces:
business-to-business, where enterprises provide goods and services for other enterprises (for example, AliExpress where Chinese factories sell goods to retail companies from over the world);
business-to-consumer, where business units sell goods and services for people (Booking.com, where owners of hotels offer their services to tourists);
consumer to consumer (Etsy.com where a deal is made between two ordinary people);
business-to-government (for example, Ukrainian recent achievement Prozorro)
The following classification is according to the way of receiving result of the deal. It is possible to underline online to offline marketplaces, where the customer receives a result in real life; and online commerce where the purchase itself and its result are completely made online.
Sometimes you can meet the following classification, which divide marketplaces into independent ones, buyer-oriented and supplier-oriented.
And the last classification is the most easy and is made according to the purpose of types of marketplaces and things they sell. There are:
product marketplaces, where different things and goods are sold;
service ones, where various services are offered (transportation services, household, car rental, repairing services, specific IT services);
hybrid marketplaces, where you can purchase goods and services as well;
project marketplaces are intended to help an investor and the initiator of some project to find each other.
E-Procurement Solutions: Modules to Use
Custom UI/UX design and development of procurement marketplaces
It is possible to purchase order management software in two ways. The first option is developing procurement system from the “box pack”. In second variant, you can purchase order software with the help of custom development. Let’s go into details of these two offers.
“Box Paсk” is a solution for start-up businesses who want to work on a classic marketplace model. This is a profitable solution for those who want to get the finished product. The main advantages of this option are that you pay once for the product, and the labor costs and time for implementation are minimal.
Custom marketplace development is a solution for serious business or innovative projects that do not fit solutions “out of the box”. Uniqueness is the main advantage of the custom trading platform. If you want your trading platform not to be limited in functionality (for example, it would be possible to arrange online auctions and tenders, modify the algorithms of electronic trading at will, etc.), it is worthwhile to focus on custom development.
Users of Procurement Systems
There are two general categories of users of such portals. There are suppliers and buyers, which can be both enterprises and private individuals from both of the sides.
The main purpose of the suppliers is to sell their goods or services in the biggest possible amount. Enterprises, companies and even private persons can perform as suppliers (for example, in the case of selling services on freelance platforms).
Enterprises, persons, and even the state can also act as customer (e.g. on Prozorro website where business satisfies the needs of the state).
Therefore, using contract management software is maximally beneficial for suppliers, who receive a possibility to show their goods to a wide audience, and for customers who can make a choice from the wide range of offers and find the best.
Technologies to Create Marketplace
Here is a list of tools, which will be useful to create purchasing and supply chain management software:
Symphony CMS is a high-performance framework written in PHP 5. The framework is based on the Model-View-Controller pattern and its architecture uses other object-oriented programming patterns very actively;
Magento is the engine for creating trading platforms, which recently is gaining its popularity. It allows you to create several online stores on your own, at the same time you can manage them from a single center. This is the main advantage of Magento CMS, which is appreciated by many site owners. When creating a procurement portal using Magento, you can easily use different currencies, in addition, if necessary, you can easily convert them. It allows you to create a convenient catalog of products with the ability to add categories and subcategories. In the online store, created on the MagentoCMS , you can functionally manage prices.
A business application or a PHP-based site, large or small, can be easily developed with limited time and budget. More advanced PHP programming means creating CRM solutions, online stores, websites with databases, etc.;
Developing sites using the Laravel framework is a solution to many problems. After all, this database allows you to create not only websites, business cards or trite single-page apps. It makes it possible to implement Laravel app projects even with non-standard functionality;
Opencart is an online store engine that can be installed on any web server with PHP and MySQL support. The developers have made sure that you can quickly and without problems accept payment from your customers. One of the most effective architectures for creating online stores is the one implemented in OpenCart, which allows you to work with a huge number of language versions, currencies, categories, products and manufacturers;
Prestashop. It is a tool that contains many modules for creating an online trading platform. It is convenient for the customer due to the ability to receive complex statistics, and developers appreciate the open source code. Modularity, SEO-optimization and the possibility of introducing updates are its main features;
Shopify is ready-made platform allowing you to easily create your own marketplace;
BigCommerce is a tool for custom development, allowing you to transfer products from Amazon, Ebay to your own marketplace;
Arcadier is a simple and intuitive platform for creating marketplaces of any direction;
Virtuemart is one of the most popular free components for creating online stores. This is due to the simplicity of its installation and the great opportunities that it possesses. Virtuemart allows you to create an unlimited number of products and categories of products, and users have the ability to perform a quick search for products, manufacturers or categories with filtering by some features (price, discount, etc.). You will be able to set different prices for products of the same type for different categories of customers or marking the goods as “special” or participating in the sale. Each of the products can be assigned a different currency, and the component can automatically convert the price from one currency to another. In addition, users are given order history, the ability to manage addresses and delivery methods, purchase discount coupons.
This is not a complete list of sites and tools that can be useful for creating your own trading platform, as each of them has its own purpose and functional features. In order to combine all the positive qualities of available tools, the best advice will be to contact an experienced developer.
How Much Does It Cost to Create Automated Procurement System?
Any work requires a certain time, and the creation of trading system is a work in which several specialists participate. The cost of creating a marketplace can go up to several thousand conventional units, and it is estimated based on labor costs: with the increase in the time for creation and development, proportionally the cost increases. Thus, the site will be created for at least several weeks, of course, depending on the final requirements for the product you want to receive.
Nevertheless, to make a little clarity, it is worth saying that creating a marketplace will take at least a month. If we have already begun to talk about the month as a temporary piece, then it makes sense to mention the average salary of Ukrainian developers, which, according to DOU, is about $1500 per month. This figure can be taken as the initial cost of developing the marketplace in Ukraine, and it should also be said that this is a very advantageous proposal. For comparison, according to the data of Clutch.Co, the hourly salary of the developer in Poland and Germany is $50 per hour, in Australia and the US it can vary from $100 to $300 per hour. By the end of the month, these amounts will exceed the fee of Ukrainian engineers several times or even dozens of times.
Where to Apply?
It is possible to conclude that creating a procurement marketplace is rather beneficial and demanded business nowadays. We also proved that creating e-procurement application with the help of Ukrainian marketplace developers will be rather expediently. Mobilunity has wide experience in implementing such projects, so applying for our help, you can be sure to receive a bright result in the shortest possible time.
Don’t hesitate to contact our responsible manager right now in order to discuss details of your project and receive e procurement solutions from us!
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