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According to Eisenmann, Parker and van Alstyne, authors of the praised article Platform Envelopment (2009): Platform business model beats product business model.
Michiel Schipperus, CEO of SANA, states that only 37% of the B2B companies have already started with E-Commerce. Besides he mentions that the yearly growth estimate for the B2B E-Commerce market is 19%.

These three findings together provide reason enough to invest in a platform. However, small businesses experience problems with setting up a platform due to the shortage of resources.
For these small business, I will discuss two free open source platforms which can become the foundation of their future E-Commerce activities.

Magento Community Edition
Magento is a well-known player in the platform industry. Their Magento Enterprise Edition is used by many large companies. With licence fees of over 10,000 euros per year, this platform solution is probably not affordable for all small business. For small business that still have to learn a lot about platforms and E-Commerce, spending such a big amount of money is probably not the best idea. However, there’s a great alternative for Magento Enterprise Edition, and that’s the Magento Community Edition. This open source platform provides lots of features. As the name suggests, there is a large community behind the platform. It provides useful guidelines to learn more about E-Commerce and the open source platform. Next to that, there is a lively community that is willing to help new players in the field when they experience problems or when something is unclear.

Learn more about Magento Community Edition here: https://www.magentocommerce.com/download

Opencart
Opencart is the second open source platform provider for E-Commerce I want to highlight. This platform is in particular useful for small businesses that don’t have programming knowledge. The simple platform interface allows users to add all kinds of plugins like products reviews and ratings. With Opencart, you can design an E-Commerce platform with unlimited categories, products and manufacturers. Compared to Magento, there is a smaller online community that can help you out it case of problems. However, this is getting compensated with the easiness and simplicity of the program.

Learn more about Opencart here:
https://www.opencart.com/

Sources:

Eisenmann, T., Parker, G., and Van Alstyne, M.W. 2009. Opening Platforms: How, When and Why? in Platforms, Markets and Innovation, Gawer, A. (ed.), Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, pp. 131-162.

Guestlecture Michiel Schipperus (2016) An introduction to Business-to-buiness (B2B) E-commerce, 3 October 2016

https://magento.com/products/community-edition, retrieved on October 22^th 2016

https://www.magentocommerce.com/download, retrieved on October 22^th 2016

https://www.opencart.com/, retrieved on October 22^th 2016

https://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=feature/feature, retrieved on October 22^th 2016

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What do Uber, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, The New York Times and Goldman Sachs have in common? They all make use of the software from the Dutch company Elastic. The in Amsterdam based company Elastic is founded in 2012 and creates search technology, which they call “ElasticSearch”.

ElasticSearch goes through large amounts of data sets, even though those data sets are scattered around hundreds different servers. ElasticSearch can be compared with Google. Where Google is indexing web pages, ElasticSearch analyses data sets to discover valuable information. Elastic created a database that can detect trends in large amounts of data. There is an enormous demand for these kind of services from companies. Most companies collect a lot of data, but have no idea what to do with it. Let’s look at some examples. Goldman Sachs uses ElasticSearch to analyse stock market transactions and it helps readers of the The New York Times to search for newspaper articles.

Is Google not in the same business? Yes they do, but ElasticSearch can search better. It also outperforms search engine services Amazon and Microsoft. In February 2015, they surpassed their rival Solr as the most popular search engine. Since then, ElasticSearch is the most popular search engine for businesses.

What makes ElasticSearch so special compared to Google?
The difference is that ElasticSearch was specifically designed to scale across hundreds of thousands of servers. Elasticsearch is opensource, Google not. Anybody is welcome to submit improvements to the ElasticSearch code base. But still, this open source challenger is years behind Google’s public search engine. Another huge benefit of ElasticSearch is the support of roughly all the programming languages.
ElasticSearch offers its software for free and asks money for extensions. This makes is easy for new users to learn the software. According to one of the founders of Elastic, Steven Schuurman, developpers fall in love with our free software and join our community. As a result, Elastic is now established in Australia, South Korea, Japan, Hongkong, Singapore and China.
They support twice as many languages than Google does! Not such a bad idea to launch an open source platform!! What do you think, will ElasticSearch retain its number one position in a market that evolves by the day? And will this Elastic ever have a chance to beat Google in the public search engine market? Or should it just focus on its solutions for businesses?

Sources:

NRC Next (2016) ‘Zoeken als Google, maar dan beter’, 9 oktober 2016: p. 2. of the economic section

http://db-engines.com/en/system/Elasticsearch%3BGoogle+Cloud+Bigtable%3BGoogle+Cloud+Datastore, retrieved on October 15^th 2016

http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/search+engine, retrieved on October 15^th 2016

https://www.wired.com/2012/12/solar-elasticsearch-google/, retrieved on October 16^th 2016

Two Open Source E-Commerce Platforms for Small Businesses

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Is ElasticSearch the new Google?

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