B2B Ecommerce Marketplace: Features, Benefits, and Examples for Wholesalers to Follow

Against all odds and pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, B2B online marketplaces are now the fastest-growing channel in wholesale ecommerce. It has even beaten the B2C online ecommerce growth rate! 

After countries lifted the quarantine restrictions, regular consumers returned to in-store shopping, which sank online B2C purchases. The wholesale sector, however, continued to see more B2B ecommerce sales as ‌B2B companies reported greater value in doing business on B2B marketplace platforms rather than returning to in-person commerce. 

Elogic has a decade-long experience building B2B ecommerce marketplaces for various industry players across multiple ecom platforms. Helping wholesalers expand overseas, grow revenue, and optimize operational workflows has been our #1 priority for B2B. Having served 100+ B2B ecommerce marketplaces, we certainly know what makes it successful.

Read on to learn the essential features of a highly functional B2B marketplace for wholesale ecommerce, the benefits businesses reap from investing in online wholesale, and the tips you should follow before building it yourself. 

So, first things first, what is a B2B ecommerce platform?

What Is a B2B Marketplace?

B2B ecommerce marketplace is a platform where businesses can trade with other businesses rather than selling products or services directly to consumers (B2C. Usually, such businesses sell products in bulk at a discount price and provide the buyers with quotes prior to the purchase.

Read more: Types Of Ecommerce Businesses: What Model Is Right For Your Online Business

You might think: if you buy something in large quantities from any website, will I be making a B2B purchase? 

Not at all. The product amount available for purchase is one of many factors that sets the B2B and B2C ecommerce platforms apart. Let’s review how they differ as these distinctions will affect your development approach.

These differences will require different features for a B2B ecommerce platform and a B2C one. Check out the essential starter pack for a successful B2B ecommerce marketplace.

Essential Features of a B2B Wholesale Marketplaces Platform

Before building a full-fledged product or an MVP to facilitate buyer-seller interactions through an online marketplace for B2B products, you should consider the needs of your business and the ones of your customers to make an informed decision.

Read more: Functional and Non-Functional Requirements for Ecommerce Website

Here’s a staple feature pack in a functional B2B multi-vendor ecommerce system to help you meet your needs.

Multi-vendor capabilities

The online B2B marketplace rarely presents mono-brand products. Instead, it brings other little companies or brands under its hood and helps them trade in various countries, reach end-customers fast, and promote the brand. 

That’s why any business-to-business marketplace should have multi-vendor management features, including but not limited to the following:

• Robust performance of product catalogs. Slow catalog search that returns irrelevant results is always one of the biggest wholesale pain points. After all, your shoppers don’t buy what they don’t find. Having an always-available catalog with filter options is one of the essential features of the B2B marketplace. Plus, make sure your webpage load speed is faster than 3-6 seconds; otherwise, expect to see sky-high cart abandonment rates.
• Localization. Your B2B marketplace vendors may also want to sell to different countries. This is why their storefront has multiple languages, offers various currencies and banking options, provides location-based shipping options, and contains valid tax and customs information.
• Different user permissions. B2B buyers always have complex buyer roles with different user responsibilities and tasks. Consider implementing user-based access to catalogs and promos while making a B2B marketplace.

Real-time inventory updates

Understanding what’s going on in your stock is paramount to the vendor’s ability to respond to market changes, deliver the products on time, and as a result, strengthen the relationships with B2B buyers. A B2B ecommerce marketplace with real-time inventory updates will allow you to have a solid grip on your inventory, supply chain, and even future purchasing decisions.

One thing you need to keep in mind: not all ecommerce platforms offer this feature out-of-the-box. 

For example, your Magento B2B marketplace will send you the inventory updates (push notifications, automatic delivery to a designated person, shortage alerts, etc) because of the built-in B2B module. However, in most cases, you’ll need to integrate a third-party ERP via API to get the accurate picture of your inventory.

Read more: ERP Ecommerce Integration: All You Need to Know

Here’s what our German B2B client did. On their way to a digital transformation in the manufacturing industry, the company was facing chaos with order management. After a deep discovery phase, the Elogic team learned that the data between the ecommerce system and the ERP were hardly synchronized. Orders could get lost and the system returned irrelevant results, showing some items as out-of-stock even though the company had plenty of them.

Only after SAP ERP integration with the commercetools platform, the client got a better view of the inventory and could track changes in real time, which helped them quickly respond to the buyers’ requests. The clients gained better visibility into the seller’s stock and could track and manage their orders more flexibly.

Custom pricing & discounts

Customer segmentation is a staple to any B2B marketing strategy. Since B2B operates with high-volume sales, it’s essential to leverage pricing and discount policies separately for each buyer. Why? Because it will help you upsell, cross-sell, and land new clients. Here’s a case in point.

Benum, a Norwegian B2B consumer electronic business, had a scaling business strategy but understood that their platform would not be able to handle the anticipated increase in workload. The Elogic team replatformed their website to Adobe Commerce Cloud, implemented the Visma ERP integration, but most importantly created a B2B portal that showed custom catalogs, pricing, and discounts depending on the user permissions.

The best part? The company has all the tools to gather more client data, properly segment customers, and provide them with tailored offers, custom prices, and unique deals.

Here are the nice-to-have pricing and payment features to keep on the radar when building a B2B wholesale marketplace:

• One-click B2B marketplace checkout (for repeat customers)
• Bulk price discount
• Minimum order discount
• Free shipping
• Ordering process type (bidding, auctioning, request for quotation, request for proposal, negotiation)
• Country-based tax management

Fast and flexible workflows

When starting with ecommerce marketplace development, there’s no way you forget automation when it comes to workflows. The reason is simple: you want your buyers and sellers to close ‌deals faster and avoid mistakes that can pop up when doing every step manually. 

For example, different ordering processes (bidding, auctioning, quote-based sales) require specific steps from the buyers (filling out the RFQ sheet, typing into one’s credentials for auctioning, preparing the paperwork for negotiations, etc.) Managing and processing these documents is often tiring and error-prone. It makes sense to use autofill and autoscan features to ensure the businesses provided each other with the relevant documents and valid information to finalize the deal safely.

Read more: Adobe AEM Magento Integration Explained in Details 

Note: sometimes, native features of ecommerce platforms have to be customized to a particular region. For instance, native Magento (Adobe Commerce) doesn’t read PDF documents written from right to left as it is in the Arabic language. In such cases, you’ll need to hire an ecommerce development team, just like our Saudi client did, to build a custom library specifically for your case.

Ease of integrations

All vendors have their own approaches to doing business, and their operations rarely depend on the same tools that others use. Some may have unique lead-generating software they’d love to integrate into the store. Others may need better business intelligence (BI) and analytic tools to make the most of their customer data. 

There may be other cases, but in the end, it all boils down to how well, smoothly, and fast one can integrate those solutions into their store on their chosen B2B ecommerce marketplace. And there are a few reasons businesses are looking for this feature:

• It allows a vendor to pack their ecommerce storefront with unique features that will bring additional value to the buyers
• Vendors enjoy the flexibility they need at every selling stage (marketing, shipping, payment, return, etc.)
• They will be able to organize their processes based on their needs rather than adjust to the tools at hand.
• They can scale their business operations by introducing new tools and features.

For example, not many ecommerce tools offer country-specific features for shipping, warehouse management, or tax handling out-of-the-box. That’s why vendors usually turn to third-party providers and integrate them as add-ons or via APIs. Using the right tools, your B2B wholesale marketplaces platform will gain the coveted agility and operational efficiency. 

Scalability

Buyers’ demand, order volume, site visits — these and many other indicators often change depending on the vendor’s marketing campaigns, seasons, and market (we bet no medical mask seller’s website was ready for a sudden uptick in customer demand at the beginning of the pandemic). 

While the pandemic is somewhat in the past, the need for a scalable and flexible solution isn’t. In fact, it’s a new norm if a vendor wants to successfully handle a variety of business challenges, launch new marketing campaigns to increase their income, and save on operational costs by managing the available resources. It’s also important for those businesses that want to create B2B marketplace ecommerce websites in new markets.

These are the must-have features that a robust ecommerce B2B platform should have. Let’s view a few B2B marketplace examples to get inspiration from.

7 Best B2B Marketplaces That Will Inspire You to Build One of Your Own

If you want to build a B2B marketplace and ensure its success, you need to learn from the best players in the industry and see how you can improve it to convince your clients to sell on your platform. 

Of course, eBay is one of the best B2B marketplaces known worldwide. We covered it in detail in our previous article, so we won’t stop on this one. Instead, we’ll talk about other attention-worthy examples.

Amazon Business

Founded in 1995 as an Internet bookstore, Amazon.com Inc has championed B2C ecommerce in many industries, tapped into entertainment, started an IT development niche, and become a worldwide known trademark that inspired other businesses to become more successful. Now it also has Amazon Business that enables a smooth, analytic-based B2B ecommerce.

Amazon Business comes in three tiers for the companies to choose the set of features that are the most relevant to their size, industry, buyers, and budgets:

• Enterprise: suits mature B2B businesses seeking a better way to handle the B2B ecommerce workflows and paperwork, customize most of their functions and design to stand out from the crowd, and get most of the data they collect along the way.
• Small business: suits businesses that have just started operating in a B2B vendor marketplace and need basic out-of-the-box features to start selling and growing fast.
• Public sector: suits companies working with the government where specific requirements and compliance may apply.

The company serves dozens of industries worldwide and currently has over 5 million business customers.

Alibaba

Alibaba is a Chinese most valuable B2C, C2C, and B2B ecommerce marketplace that has become a driving force of the country’s internal and external B2B trading. Its biggest advantage is that the platform offers B2B businesses of various sizes a way to quickly set up a storefront with minimal investment and no coding or design skills.

Besides, it provides access to over 13 million international B2B buyers, offers business tips for various industries and markets, and has a mobile app for the decision-makers to be in the know of their business.

Alibaba offers three plans:

• Standard ($3,499/year): ideal for businesses that just start B2B marketplace ecommerce and need to go online fast without compromising the quality of user experience at their digital shop.
• Standard extended ($6,498/2 years): ideal if you want to save up and secure your company’s storefront for two years upfront and get extra on a Keyword Advertising account to do better keyword targeting.
• Premium ($6,999/year): ideal for businesses targeting US-based wholesalers and B2B buyers as this plan offers six one-on-one diagnoses annually, 4 sessions of Advanced Sellers Training Course sessions, US-based key account manager, and consultation service).

CLÉ

CLÉ is an online ecommerce platform from Saudi Arabia that connects the producers of fine jewelry and watches with customers all over the globe. Founded in 2013 by Yasmeen AlShathry, the business soon acquired plenty of brands and customers worldwide, which was challenging for their online platform. They contacted Elogic for a website revamp, and here’s what we did. 

We knew that ‌website performance for such a business was a step zero, so we turned the website into a progressive web page, built a new customer portal, and connected them to a custom React front end. As a result, the business has ‌a fully functional seller account with plenty of features for a swift product, shipping and return, and content management. 

eWorldTrade

eWorldTrade is a B2B ecommerce marketplace that connects wholesalers, retailers, suppliers, manufacturers, and business stakeholders to trade their goods with other businesses. A B2B buyer can access the list of verified connected partners and place a free quote. The platform also offers Premium services that come in five tiers (eLITE, Gold, Platinum, Platinum+, Exclusive) with various features for different budgets and business needs. 

This is among the best online B2B marketplaces for those sellers who want to start selling right away and understand the market and their customers better. However, the platform doesn’t offer many custom designs, workflows, and add-on options, limiting your marketing and selling potential.

Whola

Whola is an Australian multi-brand wholesale platform specializing in B2B sales of fashion and lifestyle clothing. With over 3,000 retailer customers, a fast-to-market setup, and a reputation of a reliable marketplace, the platform has turned into a go-to ecommerce ecosystem for clothing buyers in Australia and abroad.

When Whola contacted Elogic in late 2020, the platform had performance issues that affected its business outcomes. The loading speed varied from 12 to 20 seconds, the invoicing complaints put a strain on customer service teams, and the overall functionality was too complex for B2B customers. 

All that caused the company fewer clients and sales, which, amid the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic and a 38% increase in online shopping, was not what a digital business would want. 

In five months, the Elogic team optimized the B2B software marketplace and moved their platform to the cloud, which resulted in 5x faster page loading speed and zero performance bottlenecks. We also added geolocation-based notification for the sellers to know the location and frequency of buying coming from certain regions, so they could adjust their marketing fast. The integrated HubSpot, Facebook, Klaviyo, and chatbots improved the customer experience and let the B2B sellers in the marketplace take better care of their clients.

Fashion United

Set in 1999 in Amsterdam, Fashion United has become a global clothing supplier for international buyers. The company now has around one million business buyers globally and continues to make its marketplace a convenient platform to trade with confidence and ease.

It has recently adopted a new approach to data and product management aimed to help with the chaos of B2B ecommerce product search and item publishing. With the help of AI, the seller can now automatically convert all the properties of the products into a unified format, which facilitates faster and more accurate searches.

Vegshelf

Vegshelf is a European B2B ecommerce marketplace for vegan food producers and B2B buyers. With the increasing demand for alternative meat and dairy options, the vegan market is forecast to grow annually. This business allows its sellers to source certified all-vegan products that are hard to find in retail. Plus, the company makes a convenient minimum order per product, which makes wholesale shopping affordable even for newly established businesses. 

To join Vegshelf to sell products, you’ll need to go through the verification steps before listing your business and offering products. After your account is approved, you can start managing your sales and CRM. The Vegshelf team helps with product placement and description management at no charge, which is useful for new business owners.

Afterthought

While the B2B ecommerce market is still maturing, the numbers indicate that online is already one of the most successful channels the B2B businesses should try to sell more. 

As a global B2B marketplace development vendor, Elogic clearly understands why businesses need a highly functional platform for successful B2B ecommerce.  A B2B ecommerce marketplace is a great way to connect verified sellers with trusted buyers, provide them with a reliable place to trade, make their business easily manageable for everyone on the team, and as a result, earn more from the deals. 

The great bit? There are so many B2B platforms to choose from.

If you’re ready to create your own B2B marketplace but don’t know where to start, Elogic consultants will help you choose the right tech stack based on your vision and budget. We have built and optimized marketplaces for different industries, which gave us a competitive advantage of knowing a lot of industry requirements and hacks to create a software solution that will work for you. 

B2B Ecommerce Marketplace FAQs

What is B2B ecommerce?

B2B ecommerce is a way to trade products and services with business buyers online on a mono-brand website or marketplace (a platform that provides access to multiple brands).

How does an online marketplace work?

Usually, there are three sides to the online marketplace: the buyers, the sellers, and the marketplace owners/admins. The marketplace owners verify the sellers and, if approved, provide them with the storefront so the buyers can log in and see the offer, request quotes, or participate in bidding. They also verify the buyers to keep the trading safe. After both parties are registered with the marketplace, they can explore the buying/selling options and find the best business deal for them. 

Check out the related article on how a B2B online marketplace works and what you should be aware of before creating one. 

Is the B2B ecommerce market still maturing?

It is. The B2B market is still developing despite its steady rise over the years. B2B ecommerce still has a few problems the market is figuring out, like the lack of transparency and visibility in the B2B processes and low adoption of tech to face the challenges. However, these challenges didn’t prevent the B2B ecommerce marketplace from becoming one of the trendiest sales channels for the B2B segment.