The GSMA Marketplace has been up and running since March this year and we wanted to bring you up to speed with everything that’s been happening behind the scenes these past few months. In case you aren’t familiar with what the Marketplace is here’s a quick reminder: it’s the world’s first online commerce platform that’s completely dedicated to the mobile industry. Sellers can set up their own personalised digital storefronts that potential buyers can browse before making contact. There are some organisations out there that offer similar services but there’s nothing that is completely focused on mobile or the telecommunications industry. In fact, we think we’ve created something rather unique.
We created the Marketplace because we felt that procurement in the industry could often be a time-consuming and inefficient process and, by moving it online, we could help buyers and sellers do business together more easily all year round. Currently, buyers can spend huge amounts of time identifying, contacting and evaluating potential suppliers.
In developing the Marketplace, we felt that we could use our role as a trusted intermediary in the telecoms industry to encourage our members and the wider mobile community to visit and regularly use the site. We have a track record of bringing the industry together at our events such as Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai and also our more focused Mobile 360 Series conferences. We see the Marketplace almost as a digital extension of what already happens at these events every year in terms of buyers and sellers coming together to do business, except the online element broadens the scope and offers users the opportunity to work with a larger range of organisations.
We’ve made some great progress. Today there are over 1,600 sellers on the site and 400 unique buyers from 105 countries worldwide. We’ve got major brands like AirWatch, Bharti Airtel, Etisalat, Orange, IBM, Lenovo, NTT Docomo, Nokia, Samsung and Vodafone on board, as well as a large number of less well-known but up-and-coming organisations that are regular users. Some of the most popular requested products and services are mobile enterprise solutions, cloud services, mobile advertising, application development, data analysis, systems integration, LTE network infrastructure, mobile security systems and M2M systems, demonstrating the variety and depth of the services on offer.
The GSMA Marketplace is designed to bring buyers and sellers together and we are always looking for ways to improve the service with additional functionality that streamlines the process. We recently worked on a project to make it easier for buyers to send more complicated RFX related queries to selected suppliers or even to a group of suppliers offering a similar product or service. Sellers are then able to respond to these requests with details such as price or product specs along with supporting documentation, competing with each other to win new business. The Marketplace also includes the ‘Research Centre’ that lets buyers and sellers analyse markets as well as potential partners and competitors, and provides innovative research tools and proprietary data to conduct analysis of a potential supplier, a competitor or an entire market.
We are pleased that the GSMA Marketplace is demonstrating its value to the mobile industry and is becoming a real destination to get business done. Whether you are a buyer or a seller, come and set up an account today!
For further information on the GSMA Marketplace go here.