Market Place is a generic set of applications developed within the InfoCities project to promote electronic commerce. Market Place allows improvements in business performance and commercial benefits to be evaluated. It provides guidelines for best practice to SMEs. In addition, solutions for secure electronic payment have been investigated.
Market Place covers business-to-business, business-to-administration and business-to-consumer information and transactions:
- Information on commercial activities, business support and ICT training
- Electronic catalogues of products and services Buying and selling products and services.
By mid-1998, around 6,000 businesses, professional organisations and firms in Europe were involved in Market Place; 250,000 European residents were customers and users of its products and services.
Benefits of these Services
Quality of life:
- Allowing people who are housebound and/or who live in remote or rural areas to purchase goods without having to travel
- Allowing people to purchase goods that are not available in their locality.
Flexibility of Service:
- Citizens can purchase goods and SMEs can receive orders at any time of day or night
- Suppliers can be geographically flexible as long as they have an e-mail account and stock in hand.
Employment: providing opportunities for new jobs and making new technologies widely accessible. The challenges of electronic commerce are to enhance the commercial activities of companies worldwide and to allow everybody to enter the Information Society with equality of opportunity.
