What is b2b Marketplace ?
B2b or business to business marketplace – B2b Multi vendor marketplace is a platform which connects vendors and buyer.
There are other possibilities as well-
- B2b Marketplace connects suppliers with retailer
- B2b Marketplaces connects manufacturers with distributors
- B2b Marketplaces connects Vendors with customers
and there are several use cases like this.
Why B2B Marketplace is required?
Commerce is growing very rapidly and after the Alibaba success story, B2b marketplaces are required in almost every country and also in every industry.
B2b Marketplaces directly connects suppliers to the retailers with couple of business to business tools –
Request for quote ( RFQ )
Quotes
Purchase Order
Price list
Shopping list
Multi user accounts
Quick order (order via csv)
Order approval
Sales rep management
Customer approval
Customisable catalogue
Reporting
How to create a b2b Multi Vendor Marketplace?
B2b marketplaces are complex in nature even building a marketplace requires a huge amount of market research and merchants experience.
Obviously Any one can start the b2b marketplace development from scratch but that will cost huge amount of money + time as well.
As we are building marketplaces from last 14 years and we are the largest suppliers of multi vendor marketplace software in the world. Here are our recommendation
Open source – choose open source frameworks or tools, as customisation is the key part in any b2b store or marketplace.
Community support – Along with open source ensure that community support is also there. Example B2b shops also requires huge amount of 3rd party integrations without having a proper community support framework may stuck at various places like
API integration with various retailers and dropshippers.
Payment and escrow management
Shipping and logistics management
Accounting Management
Multi channel Integration
API integration with various retailers and dropshippers.
Available platform for B2b Multi Vendor Marketplace
Solid E-commerce backing
Whatever framework or tools you are using make sure they have all the supported component available. Example – in b2b catalogue size grows exponentially. So searching could be a big problem.
So support for 3rd party search engins like elastic would be a great help. This should be from the start.
Available platforms for B2b Multi Vendor Marketplace
Magento 2 B2b Marketplace
Magento 2 is by far the most popular open source ecommerce platform. Magento 2 is already having a great b2b suite.
Using Magento 2 B2B multi vendor marketplace anyone can easily create the Multi supplier marketplace.
This Business to business multi seller marketplace includes
- Inbuilt RFQ ( request for quote )
- Pre built Quick order
- Supplier microsite
- Supplier catalogue management
- Supplier response rate and response time
- Vendor/Supplier messaging and communication
and many more. Along with that all of addons supported by Multi vendor marketplace are supported in B2b Marketplace as well.
Bagisto B2B Marketplace
Bagisto is a new kid in the town. But gained enormous popularity among the community, specially in laravel and vuejs. Best suited for b2b headless ecommerce.
It already includes Most of the features provided by Magento 2 B2b Marketplace also include headless + PWA structure as well.
