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What is a B2B Marketplace?
A B2B marketplace is an online marketplace that brings together business buyers, and sellers on one website so that they can conduct business. Business to business (B2B) denotes transactions between businesses, so the shopping process of online marketplaces must meet businesses’ supply and purchasing process needs. This is in stark contrast to the business-to-consumer (B2C) model, which focuses on individual consumers.
B2B marketplaces are sometimes referred to as B2B eProcurement websites, sourcing portals, purchasing platforms, multi-vendor marketplaces, supplies catalogs, B2B eCommerce sites, and more. These digital platforms cater to a diverse industries and business needs.
Like their B2C counterparts, top B2B marketplaces allow wholesalers and manufacturers to reach a broader market, expand beyond their traditional footprint, and accelerate business growth by tapping into new revenue streams. Unlike a traditional brick-and-mortar setup, businesses sell products to other businesses across geographical boundaries. This business model is transforming how businesses sell and procure large quantities of goods and services, fostering a truly global marketplace.
B2B Marketplace Stats
Still unsure if you should embrace the B2B marketplace model? The stats below offer a glimpse into why business-to-business marketplaces are the future of digital commerce.
B2B Marketplace Growth
B2B marketplaces are experiencing explosive growth, outpacing overall B2B eCommerce by 7.2 times. Experts predict the number of B2B marketplaces will surge from 750 in 2024 to over 1,000 in 2025.
B2B Embraces Amazon
Six in 10 B2B buyers are doing 26% or more of their B2B buying on Amazon Business.
B2B Buyer Preferences
Almost one-quarter of B2B buyers opt for a digital B2B marketplace when making an online purchase. They are drawn to the convenience, competitive pricing, and vast selection offered by these platforms.
B2B Transactions
According to Gartner, at least 70 percent of enterprise marketplaces launched will serve B2B transactions by 2023. This trend is fueled by the demand for streamlined procurement processes and secure transactions.
Types of B2B Marketplaces
B2B marketplaces for enterprises offer businesses a dynamic and efficient way to connect and transact.
B2B marketplaces for enterprises offer businesses a dynamic and efficient way to connect and transact. These platforms can be global, offering a wide variety of products (like Amazon Business); vertical, specializing in specific industries (like SupplyCore); or horizontal, offering diverse products with similar characteristics (like used goods on thredUp). No matter the format, multi-vendor marketplaces are becoming increasingly popular, allowing businesses to access a broader range of products and services.
A common type of an online marketplace is a one-to-many marketplace. Supplier-oriented marketplaces have many buyers but few sellers. An example is a corporation managing quotations or proposals from a large pool of potential buyers. Buyer-oriented marketplaces have many sellers and a single buyer like a government or a school board. A wholesale B2B marketplace provides an opportunity to sell and buy products in bulk. Global marketplaces target customers around the world, while local marketplaces are confined to a certain area.
B2B marketplaces can also be categorized as public or private. Public B2B marketplaces, like Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart, and Best Buy, are open to a wide range of buyers and sellers who meet specific criteria. In contrast, private marketplaces are created to serve the needs of a single business or a select group of businesses. For example, a company might create a private marketplace to streamline procurement across its various locations and business units or to connect its suppliers with its manufacturers.
Sourcing, procurement, and vendor management (SPVM) professionals love the versatility of marketplaces. With the best B2B marketplaces, buyers can fulfill a variety of their purchasing needs with a single onboarding process and maintain a central record of purchases and quotes. Streamlined procurement processes like these save businesses valuable time and resources. Sellers, on the other hand, can increase their revenue by reaching a global reach of customers they might otherwise miss and by improving their inventory management through the platform’s tools. Marketplace operators benefit from new revenue models, like commissions, subscriptions, listing fees, and more.
Business Benefits of a Multi-Vendor B2B Marketplace Platform
Discover how the best B2B marketplace software can transform your business to achieve cost savings alongside new revenue streams and optimize customer retention, marketing costs, and supply chain management.
Change the Way You Do Business
Think beyond the strategy of selling directly to customers. Start facilitating transactions between third-party sellers, wholesale suppliers, retailers, and their customers using an online marketplace. Efficiently grow your marketplace by adding vendors, products, and services. Enrich your core offerings without investing in additional inventory, marketing, or manufacturing and warehousing facilities. Move beyond linear selling relationships and leverage the power of independent retailers.
When you see business through the lens of an online platform, you’ll see new opportunities and strategies and look at your business models and entire organization differently. Harness the power of the B2B eCommerce marketplace and your digital transformation will completely transform your business model and operations. Prepare now for the new market, new customer expectations, and new ways of conducting business.
Create Your Own Ecosystem
Don’t be walled in by the limits of your upstream suppliers and the constraints of your downstream customers. See beyond to a complete ecosystem where technology vendors, financial service providers, complementary and even competing vendors engage in commerce with potential customers to the benefit of all.
You’ll greatly improve customer satisfaction through expanded offerings – becoming the first place business buyers will search when they start their buying journey. Transform your value chain into a rich value distribution fabric by removing friction, solving challenges, and bringing industry participants together in a 24/7 ecosystem that scales and evolves to meet their needs.
Enjoy Business Growth From New Revenue Streams
Ensure business growth by generating new revenue streams from commissions, service fees, advertising, technical service offerings, logistics services, and even payment processing without increasing your overhead costs. Once your B2B marketplace platform is established, you can even expand your brand offerings into new niches identified within the marketplace and benefit from new sources of revenue you didn’t even know existed.
A B2B eCommerce marketplace allows you to leverage existing suppliers and generate additional profit for you as you help them grow their sales. You can even generate revenue when your competitor makes a sale. Your eCommerce B2B site becomes an in-demand destination: it allows you to sell services, subscriptions, and build relationships. It’s easier to grow and expand into a new market. Eventually, you’ll unlock greater financial rewards.
Business-to-Consumer and Business-to-Business Marketplaces are Not the Same
B2C and B2B marketplaces are structured for completely different customer expectations. Business-to-consumer solutions just aren’t built to handle the complexity of a robust business-to-business marketplace. It takes a specialized digital marketplace or online platform to facilitate the needs of mid to large enterprises. Unlike their B2C counterparts, business-focused marketplaces support the complexities and best practices of business-to-business sales through features like:
- Bulk ordering and checkout capabilities
- Invoice, quote, RFP, and negotiation workflows
- Purchase order acceptance functionality
- Pricing, products, and marketing personalization
- Unique pricing with tiered or quantity discounts
- B2B-friendly payment methods and terms
PartsBase B2B Marketplace Case Study
PartsBase is the world’s largest aerospace buying and selling community, with thousands of sellers offering over 15 billion aviation parts. It’s a valuable resource for industry leaders in the aviation, aerospace, and defense industries.
Read the success storyPartsBase’s latest venture, the PartStore, is a game-changer in the aviation aftermarket.
Unlike traditional eCommerce websites, PartStore offers a transactional marketplace where buyers can shop from verified suppliers simultaneously, streamline their purchases, and complete transactions. This innovative digital platform is already gaining traction, with over 10 participants within a few weeks of launch, and an anticipated 100 by year-end.
The benefits of this digital commerce shift extend far beyond streamlined transactions. Some of the notable improvements include:
✓ Reduced operational expenses thanks to streamlined sales and payment processes.
✓ The ability to gather critical data elements for future needs and potential blockchain integration.
✓ Advanced search capabilities enable catalog search based on part numbers, manufacturers, sellers, or keywords.
✓ Order status tracking, approvals management, and personalized checkout ensure a hassle-free purchasing experience.
✓ Support for seller and customer hierarchies, segmentation, pricing, and purchasing workflows streamlines complex B2B transactions.
Why Choose Oro for Your B2B Marketplace
Find out what makes Oro the best B2B marketplace platform. Learn about its advantages for wholesalers and manufacturers and how it makes B2B sales fully streamlined.
Multi-Organization Capabilities
Built for B2B
Powerful Pricing Engine
Streamlined Negotiation Capabilities
Multiple Payment Options
Easy Integration
Flexible and Customizable
B2B eCommerce Marketplaces Create Value for All Players
With B2B marketplaces, everyone wins. Buyers get a frictionless purchasing experience and sellers enter markets they may not even know exist. A marketplace B2B destination makes everyone’s job easier.
Marketing Leaders
Marketplaces are one of the greatest disrupters to B2B eCommerce and digital marketing in the last 5 years. Adopt a new marketing strategy to access markets that otherwise represent walled-off gardens.
Technology directors
Enrich your offerings through complementary electronics payment, credit, and logistics services while maintaining your core competency and security.
SPVM Professionals
Streamline your provision processes with a B2B platform, take advantage of a wider selection of products and suppliers worldwide, and destroy the perception that procurement is a bottleneck.
Frequently Asked Questions about B2B Marketplaces
What is a B2B marketplace?
The B2B marketplace is where businesses connect and transact online. This could be a platform like Amazon Business, where diverse businesses sell to other businesses, or a specialized marketplace focusing on a particular industry. A robust B2B marketplace portal allows distributors and wholesalers to attract customers and simplify the buying experience for both buyers and internal teams. As marketplaces grow, they become stronger, capture new markets, and attract more seller and customer traffic.
At the same time, a B2B marketplace site is different from business-to-consumer (B2C), consumer-to-business (C2B), or consumer-to-consumer (C2C), and retail marketplaces.
One aspect of selling to businesses is that B2B transactions are higher value, and there are more of them.
Purchases may require a series of steps, including approvals and compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. The ordering process is different, too: B2B buyers use shopping lists (instead of shopping carts) for order creation and re-ordering.
Advanced marketplace B2B platforms are enabling businesses to automate and coordinate buying and selling processes, helping them tap into a new client base, including international buyers.
What are the types of B2B marketplaces?
B2B marketplaces can sell products, services, or bookings.
They can also be divided into vertical marketplaces, horizontal, or global. Vertical marketplaces tend to target a narrow audience in a specific B2B market, such as finished parts, services, or raw materials. Horizontal marketplaces sell products across industries. A global marketplace targets customers around the world, while a local marketplace is localized to a certain area.
There are other terms used to describe marketplaces. The term pure-play marketplace refers to businesses displaying, selling, and fulfilling products online without an offline presence. Supplier-oriented or wholesale marketplaces describe scenarios with few suppliers but many buyers. A buyer-oriented or eProcurement marketplace is the opposite, having many sellers but few buyers. However, the few buyers are usually large corporations or government-affiliated clients.
What are the monetization models of B2B marketplaces?
Marketplaces operate over diverse monetization models.
A marketplace B2B strategy may make use of one or a combination of different monetization options. The commission-based business model is a popular one, where sellers pay the commission fee per product dictated by the marketplace operator.
The membership or subscription-based model usually charges a monthly or yearly cost to the seller, while a listing fee model charges the provider for submitting a product to the platform.
What are some examples of successful B2B marketplaces?
Two famous global B2B marketplaces are Alibaba and Amazon Business. However, the marketplace trend is quickly spreading to different verticals, ecosystems, and locations.
A horizontal marketplace sells a specific type of product or service to multiple industries. Grainger, a popular B2B distributor, entered the B2B marketplace space with Zoro, a horizontal marketplace for business supplies, equipment, and tools.
How do you set up a B2B marketplace?
To build a successful online B2B marketplace, you need to carefully analyze your business niche, goals, and B2B industry needs. After all, a marketplace will only be successful if it offers competitive prices and brings real value to customers. Start with the basics, such as performing research and surveying your customers. This will help you formulate the vision, key differentiators for your marketplace, and crucial metric considerations.
Once you identify what you want to achieve, you can explore the different monetization models and features you want to include in your marketplace. Next, you’ll need to learn how to build a multi-vendor marketplace and create a minimum viable product (MVP). An MVP is a bare-bones model of your marketplace designed to further collect feedback, validate the need for your marketplace, and add improvements iteration after iteration.
The MVP approach offers you the flexibility to add more features or change the direction based on what your customers (and employees) want before it’s too late. Either way, your B2B marketplace management system needs to be flexible enough to support you every step of the way.
What is the best platform for a B2B wholesale marketplace?
A great B2B wholesale marketplace enables every member of the platform — be it the operator, the buyer, or the seller — to perform key marketplace functions with ease. Such a platform allows:
- Management of roles and permissions for buyers, vendors, and the marketplace operator
- Support for multiple monetization and pricing strategies, including options for wholesale pricing and discounted prices
- Personalized payment methods, including invoices
- Discount and promotion engine to create personalized offers and coupons
- Automated RFQ/RFP processes
- Order splitting and routing features
- Multiple warehouses management
- Expert online support
OroCommerce is among the few platforms on the market that offer these capabilities in a comprehensive package. We draw upon our vast B2B eCommerce experience and expertise to develop innovative solutions, enabling wholesale businesses to launch quickly and start benefiting from a new way of selling online.
Want to get started?
These resources will help you build and grow a successful B2B marketplace business
Understanding the Next Wave of eCommerce: Guide to Enterprise Marketplaces
This guide created by Oro Inc. and Novalnet helps you recognize the power of a marketplace site or app to transform your business model and determine if operating a marketplace is right for your company.
B2B Buyer Preferences in the eCommerce Marketplace Economy
We conducted a survey of the 100 B2B procurement managers who use B2B marketplaces. The result is a collection of the most comprehensive insights on marketplace B2B purchasing experiences to date.
B2B Marketplaces: Is This Model For You? [Podcast]
Tune in to discover what makes B2B marketplaces a trending business model and the key considerations for launching your own B2B marketplace.