The progress and wider dissemination of electronic commerce will be facilit
ated through interoperability infrastructures. Commerce Net's eCo framework
is a promising effort in this direction. In the eCo framework, businesses
participate in a marketplace through standard interfaces for their services
and by exchanging standardized documents. This framework does not specify
any further interfaces for the services a marketplace itself may offer.
In this paper, we demonstrate that a rich set of marketplace-specific servi
ces such as automated discovery of the needed services, comparison shopping
, and negotiation can be offered to market participants by introducing a ma
rketplace as an eCo business. For this purpose, a previously developed mark
etplace, namely MOPPET, is made eCo-compliant. We demonstrate that introduc
ing MOPPET as an eCo business increases the functionality of the eCo marker
in the sense that several market specific services become available to the
market participants.