B2B Marketplace

A marketplace is a platform where vendors can meet to sell their products or services to a specific group of customers. The main role of the marketplace operator is to gather the right vendors and the right customers to grow sales through the multi-vendor platform. The sellers have a place to gain exposure and sell their products, while the platform owner earns a commission on each sale. On the other hand, an online store is a single store that sells its own products online.

The owner of the marketplace does not own the goods that the platform sells, unlike the owners of online stores. Hence, the marketplace owner leaves the more operational side of the business to the vendors, focusing mainly on promoting the marketplace brand in order to attract traffic to the platform and converting site views into sales. In practice, a marketplace is a form of rental service that offers the functionality of an online store.

A marketplace is a flexible platform that can specialize in a specific industry, in which case it is a vertical platform, or offer its services to many different industries, in which case it is a horizontal platform.

From the supplier’s point of view, the marketplace means simple inventory management, much greater business scalability and a better ability to focus on identifying customer needs. The buyer, on the other hand, has one place where he can access products from different suppliers in the expected market segment.

A marketplace, especially in the service area, is also a process; an individual sales or industry process, reflecting the specificity of building relationships between suppliers and buyers. The platform then becomes the place that allows the buyer to associate with an individually selected supplier according to an established profile.