The BIG success of unicorns like Amazon Business, Alibaba has proved the success of the B2B marketplace. And it shows no signs of slowing down. With the business-to-business marketplaces gaining momentum, it is important for merchants to look for more ways to grow their business. One of the best ways to sell to more customers and grow business is to build a B2B marketplace website.
So, you would like to create an online marketplace but you are not sure about the requirements and the best way to proceed with it.
How B2B ecommerce is a gold mine of opportunities?
In a nutshell, an online marketplace allows sellers an easy access to the wide audience of B2B buyers. You can build a B2B marketplace website to offer numerous advantages to merchants, vendors as well as customers. The vendors gain better business visibility, business owners earn commission from online marketplace sales, and customers get a great product choice and consistent service.
So, connecting all of them on a single platform and automating the buying and selling process is the whole idea behind building a B2B marketplace website.
It is evident that the enterprise ecommerce space is growing rapidly over the past decade and still has a long way to go. Here are some surprising facts that indicate why merchants are building online marketplaces and why you should consider building one with a B2B ecommerce solution.
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75% of the B2B purchases are already made online
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47% of the B2B buyers search online during the buying process
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By 2023, over 667 million of the population will become active users of internet
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Over 1/3 of B2B buyers will get persuaded to choose the merchants on the basis of their ability to place, track and return orders, and pay online
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Only 6% of the B2B buyers do not currently use the online marketplaces
Table of Contents
9 Easy steps to build a B2B marketplace website for wholesale businesses
If your goal is to build an excellent online marketplace where the website brings value to business while building long-term customer relationships, here are the steps you need to build your B2B marketplace website.
Step 1: Decide the core business idea for your business by spotting an excellent B2B marketplace opportunity.
Step 2: Decide your brand name before you start to build a B2B marketplace website and get it registered.
Step 3: Get your paperwork done while complying with local legislations where you are operating the business.
Step 4: Buy your business domain. Keep this step in mind when you are deciding your brand name.
Step 5: Choose the right B2B ecommerce solution to build your marketplace website. It is one of the major decisions you will take to boost your business.
Step 6: Onboard the manufacturers, suppliers and distributors on your marketplace website.
Step 7: Set up a dedicated support team to help your customers
Step 8: Test and go live once you build a B2B marketplace website successfully. Rolling out a marketing teaser to create a market buzz is always useful for your business.
Step 9: And that’s all. You are all set to launch your online marketplace. Get ready to earn commissions on every order placed on your website.
How to find the right B2B ecommerce solution?
Once you have all the B2B fundamentals in place, it is the time to start building the online marketplace. The easiest way to do it is to use a ready-to-go ecommerce platform with inbuilt features and easy customizations that can set up your B2B marketplace platform in a few days. To find the perfect solution, consider these factors:
1. Cost
Depending upon your wholesale business requirements, the cost to build a B2B marketplace website can range somewhere between $25,000 to $180,000. To calculate the cost of development, you have to multiply the number of hours worked by the development team with the hourly rates. And it will require nothing less than 8-12 months to complete this project. Also, you will have to spend extra bucks on further customizations, software updates, and platform maintenance.
One of the easiest ways to build an online marketplace is to choose StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solution. And considering the cost factor, it is as minimal as you can ever think of. You can build your platform at a fraction of the cost of building the website from scratch while getting a feature-rich and customizable B2B ecommerce platform. It does not only offer a complete ecommerce solution but also offer Android/iOS apps without any additional cost.
2. Customizability
Every enterprise business has its unique requirements and it is important for ecommerce platforms to deal accordingly. And StoreHippo aces the customization features that allows you to make changes to the front end as well as backend of the website. The ability of customizations along with a large variety of enterprise-grade features makes it a perfect solution for high-volume orders and large-scale businesses.
3. Security
Well, it is not just an informative website where the users come, read, and leave. It is a full-fledged ecommerce website where a lot of transactions will take place. So, the security concern matters the most. StoreHippo offers a highly secure B2B ecommerce solution with extensive features by securing the transactions by PCI-DSS compliant Payment Gateway, providing the data encryptions, strong security of all the user access, compulsory login for the B2B website, audit trails, and more. It also offers SSL security to keep your online business protected and assure the safe experience of customers. This set of features enhance the security of enterprise websites while offering best-in-class user experience.
4. Advanced B2B features
Every enterprise business has unique requirements and the advanced B2B features can help you gain a competitive edge over others. Some of the great enterprise-grade features offered by StoreHippo include multiple storefronts, multilingual webstore, customized pricing for wholesale and retail pricing, seamless bulk order process systems, white-labelling for branding, audit trail and restricted login for enhanced security, and much more.
5. Benefits of m-commerce
Mobile commerce is not a fancy thing anymore. With the comfort of mobile phones is increasing at a faster pace, the adoption of mobile commerce is increasing at an even faster rate. Not only as retail shoppers but also as wholesalers. And why not? A Google study has indicated that mobile is driving the revenue for more than 40% of the B2B companies. StoreHippo is a B2B ecommerce solution that allows you to leverage the m-commerce market with PWA (Progressive Web Apps) to make your website look like native apps. And that’s not all. You can also build your Android/iOS apps directly from the dashboard without any additional cost.
Conclusion
Why is StoreHippo the best solution to build a B2B Marketplace Website?
StoreHippo offers extensive B2B features while keeping all your online business needs in mind. Our platform has evolved with the constant changes in business and added many new features to suit the needs of wholesale businesses. Its comprehensive online marketplace solution offers a flexible yet easy-to-use platform to boost your business in every possible manner.
With the addition of B2B specific features like wholesale and retail pricing structure, location-based pricing, customized invoicing and forms, multi-tier taxation, and 50+ payment gateways to handle the payments of distributors, vendors and customers, this B2B ecommerce solution offers you everything you need to ace your B2B online store. Start your 14-day free trial to explore all these features and decide yourself.
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