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Just weeks after Carrefour and Sears announced their electronic marketplace, which now includes also Kroger, Sainsbury and Metro, eleven other commerce giants made it even bigger. The WorldWide Retail Exchange joins together Ahold (The Netherlands), Albertson's (US), Auchan (France), Casino (France), CVS (US), Kingfisher (UK), K-Mart (US), Marks & Spencer (UK), Safeway Inc. (US), Target (US) and Tesco (UK). Together the group operates over 30,000 stores and had 1999 combined sales of over Euro 300 billion (USD 300 billion).

Cora, a leading French-Belgian retailer, has taken the decision to join shortly. On 4 April, the largest drugstore chain in the United States, Walgreens, became part of the WorldWide Retail Exchange. This is believed to help the company streamline purchases and cut costs.

Ahold's press release on 31 March describes the WorldWide Retail Exchange is a web-based marketplace, enabling transactions between retailers operating in the food, general merchandise, and drugstore sectors. It is an open exchange and provides an information highway of publicly available item data together with private price and promotion information between multiple buyers and sellers. The exchange will also provide the means for auctioning products.

Uni Commerce is engaged in a social dialogue with many of the companies that participate in these new ventures. In this dialogue, the employment effects of these developments will be raised, in close contact and consultation with affiliated commerce trade unions. Carrefour has already been approached, with questions about how the new GlobalNetXchange will influence the company's workforce.