Exploring Transportation Electronic Marketplaces: An Insight Into Their Business Models

The rapid spread of electronic business and its underlying technology, the Internet, has induced a completely new landscape for the transport industry in recent years. Among the most significant effects of the widespread use of the Internet in business on the industry is the emergence of new players running digital marketplaces - Transportation Electronic Marketplaces (TEMs) - that aggregate buyers and sellers of transportation services and facilitate transactions between them. This paper provides an insight into the characteristics of TEMs' business models and their potential relevance with regard to the long term viability of these businesses. This is achieved through the identification of a reference framework encompassing several descriptive dimensions of TEMs' business models and its application for the analysis of a sample of marketplaces.