Method for a Marketplace for Bills of Materials

A method comprising:

• steps for transmitting information to a server system from a buyer for a bill of materials;
• steps for receiving notifications from the server system during a bidding period of the bill of material;
• steps for receiving a closing notification from the server;
• and
• steps for transmitting to the server system the buyer's determination regarding a winning bid information.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium with an executable program stored thereon, wherein the program instructs one or more processors to perform the following steps:

• transmitting information to a server system from a buyer for a bill of materials, the server system being configured to enable a marketplace, wherein the server system processes the information into a bill of material, sanitizes the bill of material to produce a sanitized bill of material having information regarding the buyer removed, posts the sanitized bill of material to the marketplace to be viewable to all users of the marketplace, records bids form sellers for the sanitized bill of information, and posts bidding activity to the marketplace to be viewable to all users of the marketplace;
• receiving notifications from the server system during a bidding period of the sanitized bill of material, the notifications at least including the bidding activity;
• receiving a closing notification from the server, the closing notification at least including a notice of an end to the bidding period and a winning bid information;
• and
• transmitting to the server system the buyer's determination regarding the winning bid information.