Marketspacean information- and communication-based electronic exchange environmentis a concept in marketing that emerged in the mid-1990s. Since physical boundaries no longer interfere with buy/sell decisions, the world has grown into several industry specific marketspaces which are integration of marketplaces through sophisticated computer and telecommunication technologies. The term marketspace was introduced by Jeffrey Rayport and John Sviokla in 1994 in their article "Managing in the Marketspace" that appeared in Harvard Business Review. In the article the authors distinguished between electronic and conventional markets. In a marketspace, information and/or physical goods are exchanged, and transactions take place through computers and networks. These networks consist of blogs, forum threads, and micro-blogging services like Twitter; although their article predates Twitter. Businesses and their customers are enabled to create conversations and two-way communications about products and services. These conversations may also happen outside the sphere of control of a given business, when a marketing campaign or customer-service issue captures the attention of web-savvy consumers. Marketspace vs Marketplace A Marketspace is an online space that facilitates bi-directional commerce. Here not only sellers can list their goods, but buyers can list their needs. The role of the Marketspace is to match buyers and sellers whose contexts have sufficient similarity - if the product being offered and being requested has a high degree of match and the buyer and seller can come to agreement on price, location and timing, then a successful match can be made that will culminate in a transaction. Online Marketplaces like Etsy or eBay allow vendors to display and sell products taking advantage of the traffic to the site. The marketplace owner typically takes a commission on the sale. In 1999, the book The Cluetrain Manifesto discussed the notions surrounding how the traditional marketplace was adapting itself to the age of the webwhere "markets were conversations". By 2010, we see the emergence of numerous online marketplaces: Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and a number of other large online retailersyet these were still largely inventories of supply that consumers would browse and purchase from. However, a new concept of a marketspace is emergenta bi-directional medium which is able to inventory both supply and demand, allow both parties in a transaction to find each other, establish a temporary "buyer-seller" relationship, and then execute the transaction.
Impact
The marketspace article by Jeffrey Rayport and John Sviokla in Harvard Business Review led to various subsequent Academic investigations in the field of business and marketing. Especially in the field of international business, with its geographic distance sensitivity that the global concept of the marketspace obliterates, the concept of marketspace in the form of the Internet received Academic interest. Jim Hamill, a reader in the marketing department at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, U.K., at the time, was one of the first to note this link in his 1997 paper. Three years later, a PhD student at the same department investigated the link between marketspace and international business explicitly. However, at present, the term Internet is commonly used to refer to what the term marketspace is referring to.
