The business to business e-market place is an online stage where buyers and sellers come to correspond, pool resources and make business transactions. E-market place caters a large number of participant companies as a community. The main objective of an e-market place is to create a location, filled with features that allow members to efficiently conduct significant portion of business processes on the Net.

There are several ways to conduct business to business ecommerce depending on the type of e-market place. They are public, private, horizontal and vertical. The public e-market place is open to all companies, whereas the private e-market place has restricted membership. Then there is the horizontal e-market place which caries out business on a large number of products from different industries, whereas vertical e-market place is industry oriented.

B2B exchanges are a way of building lucrative e-business environment on the Internet, which is capable of producing real and proven business benefits to the participants.

There are many causes of using the b2b e-market place in business to business ecommerce. First, it leads to acquirement of a large range of buyers without much hassle. Then buyers can learn, evaluate and explore a product offered on a marketplace without leaving it and take instant decision of whether to purchase it or not. Besides, the use of electronic procurement, which is the method of conducting transactions between buyers and suppliers over the Internet, has become the part and parcel of a B2B marketplace.

The advantages of e-procurement include a reduction of overhead costs such as purchase agents, as well as improved control of accounts, and the overall improvement of the manufacturing sequence. Moreover, the usage of an e-catalog which is an online content product solution has also proved beneficial as it offers proficient routing, probing and assimilation facilities to arrange and publish product informations.

Thus business to business e-commerce is developing very fast. As a result, in the future most business transactions will take place through the Internet.