eProcurement has traditionally been the preserve of a handful of visionary corporations and involved spending many millions of pounds on dedicated systems, but rarely did these users see a return on their investment. It was agreed at The Lisbon Conference, that all Governments would buy online by 2005. All FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies now buy online and this trend is moving downwards to smaller corporate companies and larger SMEs. Companies that cannot supply online within the next two years will find it increasingly difficult to retain their current business and also to win new accounts of any note.

Yet many major companies still strive to improve the efficiency of their procurement processes, if not on their entire procurement spend, at least on their horizontal category procurement (MRO, stationery, business equipment and IT). Traditionally, traders and resellers launched Internet webstores offering a single product range and pricing structure to both their customers and prospects. This lack of differentiation has resulted in many established customers using these webstores to browse for products and then pick up the telephone to enquire about better pricing, thereby defeating the object of the webstore as a channel to market. Today, there is a marked shift by larger resellers to offer their corporate and medium sized clients a more dedicated solution. In addition to all of the features of the webstore the CXcommerce eProcurement module offers the following additional functionality:

Feature	Description
Front end Personalisation	The homepage of all eProcurement module sites can be personalised for each customer, including logos, addresses and colour schemes to match with the general theme of the supplier's and/or customer's website.
Adding Cost Centres	A major feature of eProcurement module is the ability to add cost centres to enable end users to control all expenditure across a number of departments. A head administrator controls all cost centres:
Adding new users	Administrators can add new users and issue unique logins for each new user.: - Each new user can be assigned to a cost centre, have a monthly budget and single order limit and can be set up so that their orders are authorised prior to being sent to you. - The range displayed to each user can be varied, so that for example, the catering department cannot buy PCs, whilst the PC department cannot buy beverages.
Core Lists	Repeat ordering can be streamlined through the use of Core lists, a facility that allows the listing of up to 150 regularly ordered products.
Site Exclusivity	Only authorised users can access an eProcurement module site. Authorisation is verified through a simple login process, giving direct to the users account.
Comprehensive and flexible pricing control	The eProcurement module sites can be priced specifically for each customer to ensure they are receiving the best prices on regularly used products while able to browse the full catalogue. Product ranges can be tailored to suit customers' needs and fulfil pre-negotiated contracts.
High Level of Control over Users	Reseller and company administrators have control over user administration including: - Adding and removing users - Re-assigning users across cost centres - Setting order and budget limits - Setting order authorisation by a superior, if required - Limiting access of individual users to specific product ranges - Allowing users to see prices or not.
Custom Delivery	The administrator can create custom delivery options for every user and set specific pricing options for deliveries.
Custom Products	Adding custom products to the product database allows users to reach their full product range from outside our established, distributor product feed, whilst keeping all the benefits of reporting and pricing schemes.
Purchase Reports	This allows users to manage what, where and when items are purchased according to the following criteria: - Cost centre - User - Date range.
Purchase Summaries	Can be filtered/ordered by: - Cost centre and date range - User and date range.
Financial Summaries	Can be filtered/ordered by: - Cost centre and date range - User and date range.
Reseller notified of Orders via email	Orders placed are notified to the reseller by email. Optionally an XML document containing the order information can be attached to the order notification email to facilitate import into back office systems.
Product Usage	Summaries can be filtered/ordered by: - Cost centre and date range - User and date range.
Multi tiered Authorisation process	Up to 5 tiers of authorization can be set at separate authorization levels based on order quantity.