Classroom Companion: Business

10.5 
 Trade Process of MSPs and Resellers
The MSP is one of several ways to organize a company. Another common type of 
organization is the reseller illustrated in 
.
Fig. 
10.6
. The reseller purchases goods 
and services from a producer and resells these goods and services to the buyer. The 
Platform
Proffe-
sionals
Content 
Proividers
Merchants
Customers
Advertisers
Developers
. Fig. 10.5 Generic 
ecosystem for MSPs. 
(Authors’ own figure)
Producer
Buyer
Reseller
. Fig. 10.6 The reseller. (Authors’ own figure)
10.5 · Trade Process of MSPs and Resellers

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10
buyer receives the goods and services from the reseller, who, in turn, receives pay-
ment from the buyer.
One important requirement for being an MSP is that the platform enables a 
direct contact between the user groups attached to it. An electronic marketplace, 
such as eBay, is different from a supermarket in this respect. The supermarket is 
not an MSP since there is no direct contact between the shopper and the supplier. 
The supermarket is a reseller. On the other hand, eBay may sell the same goods as 
the supermarket, but eBay is an MSP since there is direct contact between supplier 
and buyer. For similar reasons, a taxi company is not an MSP, while Uber is.
An example of a reseller is Amazon: Amazon buys books from publishers and 
resells them to readers in the same way as any other bookstore. Resellers of tele-
communications services are another example of resellers—they purchase bulk 
traffic capacity from a network operator and resell it in subscription packages to 
the customers.
The MSP platform may be quite simple. It may consist of a single app loaded 
down from the Internet and processed on the smartphones of the supplier and the 
customer. In other cases, the platform may be complex such as the platforms of 
Google and Facebook. The MSPs may then be companies ranging in size from 
one-person enterprises to large corporations. Most sharing economies are two- 
sided or multisided platforms.
.
Figure 
10.7
illustrates a trade process for an MSP. The MSP mediates 
contact between the seller and the buyer. Observe the similarities between the 
MSP and the value network in 
7
Chap. 
8
. The trade—including the flow of 
goods, services, and payment—is done directly between the seller and the buyer 
and facilitated by the MSP. The MSP is not directly involved in the exchange of 
goods.
Buyer
Seller