Most such estimates predict that the biggest volumes of business will be done in sectors such as electrical equipment, industrial machinery, oil, chemicals, metals and energy, where deals can be negotiated and items paid for electronically with minimal requirements for human intervention.
Once again, it is the ability of electronic networks to aggregate and compare products and prices that makes this possible, combined with the low costs of electronic transactions. But the ways in which this is happening now are not necessarily those originally envisaged by industry analysts and suppliers.
Companies selling b2b procurement software, once the darlings of the stock markets, have had to change radically as the vertical markets they once served have proved to be too limiting to form the basis for profitable businesses. B2B exchanges, too, once touted as the glittering future of e-commerce, have been forced to re-examine their businesses.
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