In B2B world, sourcing is a decentralized supply chain where different companies are trying to strive for information while maximizing the value of the currency. We have trade media and sellers, both are competing in this flat world.

Wait… trade media, should be a companion, are competing with sellers? Well, if the information that everyone is relying to make decision, the same information becomes a very important currency. So essentially, media and sellers are competing to maximize the value of information. This is how I see the digital economy works philosophically.

In my last post I said searching was the synonym of sourcing. Let me refine and elaborate this statement. Searching is the beginning of sourcing. So when buyers begin their experience on searching, we all want to engage them when the time the information flow begins. A sensible marketing way is to pay the B2B marketplace for the listing service, pay search engines for contextual advertising, or pay to optimize for good search engine organic ranking.

If you search “China DVD player, China SD Card, China MP3 player” on Google, tons of product keywords are being optimized by a few B2B media. This is how I begin to see a centralized supply chain when all the information are being possessed by a few companies.

But please don’t get me wrong, if you know how much that the B2B media have invested to market their websites or to pay for optimizing their visibility on search engines, you should appreciate such an enormous efforts of money and skill have been spent to make everything works. These are not easy jobs. These are certainly not easy jobs for small and medium enterprises.

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