B2B Bartering.

• Author: LAINSON, SUZANNE
• Position: Brief Article

Website business models are falling out of favor so fast that between the time this is written and published, the buzz words may have changed entirely. Accepting that risk, I'm going to focus on a concept that has gotten a fair amount of attention lately: the business-to-business exchange.

A true exchange operates like the New York Stock Exchange or the Chicago Board of Trade. Colorado is going to have one of those soon. Fort Collins-based CyberCrop.com, a real-time exchange for cash commodities such as corn, soybeans and wheat, plans a full launch in July. Unlike the futures market, where people trade options to buy grain, CyberCrop.com's exchange will facilitate the actual sale of the commodities. According to CEO Scott Deeter, who spent the last 10 years in agribusiness with Cargill and Koch Agriculture, "We are an exchange giving multiple buyers and sellers the opportunity to trade 24 hours a day versus a bid posting site or an auction site. CyberCrop.com is a good addition to traditional commodity institutions which deal only with the futures market."

What distinguishes the B2B exchange concept from other B2B sites is dynamic pricing. Unlike B2B sites that are merely catalogs selling fixed priced items to businesses, dynamic pricing sites offer variable pricing options. One such example is the online auction. Another is the online exchange.

The online auction is the simpler of the two. A seller offers something to sell and buyers bid on it. The online exchange is a two-way process, with buyers and sellers both making offers. If someone is willing to sell and someone else is willing to buy, a deal can be made. No waiting around for multiple bids.

Another Colorado company planning an exchange component is Longmont-based e-Greenbiz.com. The company, which had a soft launch in January, is a vertical portal for the "green industry," serving landscapers and garden centers on the buy side, and nurserymen, greenhouse growers and...