Abstract: An Internet trading network is operated by establishing supplier memberships of suppliers providing offerings to the trading network; establishing customer memberships of customers providing volume commitments; consolidating all volume commitments for a particular commodity or service when negotiating an offering with the supplier; managing memberships and their accounts.

Abstract: Under the present invention, when a requestor submits a request for an item, a single, appropriate back-end system for processing the request is identified. Typically, the back-end system is identified based on the item requested and a location setting within the requestor's profile. The location setting generally indicates the requestor's geographic location and their job responsibility. Once a particular back-end system is identified, subsequent requests in the same order are limited to items that are associated with the identified back-end system. If the requester attempts to request an item that is not available via the identified back-end system, an error message is displayed.