Marketplaces will rule the shopping cart of the enterprise with SpotBuy

As I mentioned in my earlier blogpost that the next few years will be war of marketplaces
Today's post I would like to go a notch deeper into the specifics.

First of all let's define what's SpotBuy

1. SpotBuy is a way to instantly order goods or services that are not part of a company's catalog, it's an unplanned purchase. In a real life example if you were headed camping and you forgot to luggage in your tent, you had to pullover to a nearby Walmart to SpotBuy it at the shelf label price without having much room for analyzing a planned scenario ahead of time before your event.
2. In the enterprise ....Often you'd see someone rushing to procurement Ops desk saying it's an emergency purchase attaches a PDF or brings in a printout and wants the order to route ASAP, mostly I've seen marketing running into such issues since the promotional catalog might be missing a SKU for the occasion.

Mitigate protocol is a P-Card

.....Most companies use P-Card for this scenario, however P-Card has its own positive and negative nuances. Control on spend is lost , visibility into accounting is GL driven and Reconciliation can be a nightmare if the P-Card provider doesn't support Level 2,3 enrichment.
Now that you understand what SpotBuy is, you'd realize that decentralization of the channel happens to give birth to connecting a content rich , reliable marketplace to be connected to the company's procurement system to help cater to Ad-hoc or outside the enterprise catalog scenarios.
A typical Level 1 Punchout can also be deemed as a SpotBuy , the only differentiator is that it's a catalog and not a marketplace of sellers.
The best part is that over a quarterly horizon these can be analyzed & where repetitive can be added into the company's standard catalog which is negotiated vendor pricing.

Why will marketplaces aim at the enterprise shopping cart

Reasons are many, let's understand a few index movers

• Spend coming off an enterprise increases sales via the marketplace channel.
• Marketplace sellers that are already OFAC and AML checked will operate at high standards of quality thus making it a win win for the marketplace , the customer and the marketplace seller.
• If procurement gets mature with the end user managed process this brings "SpotBuy" first to see if the market price trends better than what customers are already paying, further bringing a level set in the entire equation wrt competition.
• With the universal charge document to give a level 3 to make a invoice less transaction a PO Flip flavor improves procurement transactional governance.

All in all "the more marketplaces enabled" we'd be seeing healthy competition in the supply base and more options for the end-user
It's pretty implicit why marketplaces will want to be the SKU of choice in the enterprises Shoppng Cart....