an Internet marketplace

introduction

Any area where an e-commerce exchange takes place is an Internet marketplace. Real money is exchanged for real goods, just like in a real market.

The real machinery needed to make my marketplace work is an LIC (Larg's Internet Cluster). The LIC is the physical foundation that the virtual marketplace is built on. All the human work like sales, marketing and customer relationships revolve around the marketplace, but are irrelevant to the LIC.

We can logically divide the work needed to supply an Internet service into the pretty stuff and the ugly stuff. The pretty stuff covers what customers see such as marketing, graphics and copywriting. This is the front of the service. There is also the ugly stuff at the back such as network administration and programming. This document is concerned with the ugly backside of Internet services.

what it is

All organisations exchange resources with others. All companies have a need for marketplaces where buyers and sellers congregate to exchange goods and services for money. The Internet is a modern opportunity for exchange. The Internet exchange of goods and money is . All on-line exchanges are bundled under the one banner of e-commerce. I have no idea who came up with the marketing concept of taking the words commerce and electronic and sewing them together with a hyphen.

An IMP is an extension of a physical commerce marketplace with shouting street hawkers and stripy stall awnings. If you want to sell something in an IMP then you may have to carry out all sorts of tasks such as design a site, create it, advertise it, take orders, deliver information and so on.

what it isn't

This document describes how to build and run an LIC. The LIC is what this document is all about. I do not touch anything to do with markets.