Planning to build a B2B marketplace and wondering what tools you need to stand out?
Imagine a platform that streamlines your operations and creates an effortless experience for your customers.
What if you could automate inventory, connect seamlessly with your CRM, and offer smooth payment processing—all in one place?
The right integrations can do just that and more.
Curious to know how multiple integrations on your B2B marketplace can set you up for success?
Table of Contents
How To Make Your B2B Marketplace Stand Out With Powerful and Essential Integrations
Before we dive into the 10 essential integrations every thriving wholesale marketplace needs, let us see the growth of the B2B ecommerce market:
- $20.4 trillion will be the market value of B2B ecommerce by 2027
- 74% of B2B buyers prefer online buying over buying offline
- 70% of B2B buyers started using m-commerce channels more in the past 2-3 years
- 250% increase in B2B mcommerce orders from 2020 to 2024
- 4-6 digital channels are used by wholesale buyers to finalize a purchase
- 72% of B2B buyers expect personalized experiences across all channels
Source: Forbes, McKinsey & Company, Digital Commerce 360
With the immense growth in the B2B ecommerce sector, businesses need to simplify online selling. To seamlessly capture a share of the expanding market, brands must leverage a robust B2B ecommerce solution that supports multiple integrations with essential tools like CRM systems, ERP software, payment gateways, and logistics providers. With a platform that has diverse integration capabilities, B2B brands can position themselves for scalable growth.
10 Must-Have Integrations for Every B2B Marketplace
What does running a B2B marketplace mean? It is more than just listing the products, onboarding the vendors, and managing orders. You need multiple integrations and tools to keep operations smooth, optimize customer experiences, and drive business growth.
Here are 10 essential integrations every business needs to create a B2B marketplace and manage B2B business operations smoothly.
1. Inventory Management Systems
Managing inventory effectively is crucial for large-scale B2B businesses. Yes, you need a robust B2B marketplace platform with an inventory management system that ensures real-time updates and allows you to track stock across multiple warehouses and sales channels. It helps businesses maintain accurate stock levels, avoid stockouts, and manage complex inventory data from multiple suppliers. By centralizing inventory data, you can enable real-time updates on product availability, streamline order fulfillment, and minimize stock errors. For marketplaces handling thousands of SKUs and multiple vendors, efficient inventory management reduces the risk of order delays and enhances customer satisfaction.
StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions come with a built-in inventory management tool that automatically updates stock levels as orders come in. It simplifies the task for vendors and marketplace owners with its multi-location inventory feature by managing stock from different regions and providing centralized control. You can also set low-stock alerts or out-of-stock options to help buyers make informed buying decisions. With StoreHippo’s powerful inventory management solution, you do not need to integrate with other inventory management tools for operational efficiency.
2. Vendor Management
Efficient vendor management tools facilitate streamlined interactions between business-to-business marketplaces and their diverse supplier base. You can centralize vendor information, including contact details, product catalogs, contract terms, and performance metrics, enabling efficient monitoring and supplier management. For large-scale B2B marketplaces, an effective vendor management system enables seamless onboarding, improves communication, and ensures that vendors meet quality and compliance standards. This integration also supports automated processes, such as order routing and performance tracking, which are crucial for maintaining strong vendor relationships and ensuring a consistent supply of goods.
StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with built-in advanced and comprehensive vendor management tools that offer a quick and easy vendor registration process to help your B2B sellers start selling quickly. Even novice sellers with no technical knowledge can quickly sell on the platform with StoreHippo’s easy-to-use features. When you build a B2B marketplace with StoreHippo, you get full control to approve or reject the products uploaded by your vendors. StoreHippo also offers a separate vendor dashboard to each vendor offering an easy understanding of inventory and order status. The vendors get a snapshot of their business using the dashboard which provides order summary, sorting functionality, sales report, best-selling products, revenue details, and much more. With the built-in multi-vendor solutions from StoreHippo, you do not need third-party integrations to manage your vendors.
3. Marketing Tools
Effective marketing is critical to driving traffic, converting leads, and retaining customers in a B2B marketplace. Marketing tools empower large B2B marketplaces to attract, engage, and retain customers with targeted marketing campaigns across multiple channels. You can also send out tailored messages to engage and convert customers. For B2B platforms, marketing tools can drive brand awareness, generate qualified leads, and promote specific vendors or products. By integrating marketing tools with other systems, marketplaces can analyze customer data, track the success of campaigns, and adjust strategies in real time, ultimately driving sales and supporting long-term growth.
StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions come with built-in marketing tools that help you reach a wider audience and engage directly with customers. You can draw more customers to your marketplace by offering quick discounts using the powerful discount engine to set up flat or percentage-based discounts for products, collections, categories, user groups, device-specific audiences, and more. You can also promote your business by offering various rule-based coupons on your marketplace and B2B sales app. StoreHippo also helps you create dynamic marketing pages that pull information from your database as and when required. You can recover abandoned carts by automated follow-ups from StoreHippo. Add push notifications Moreover, StoreHippo’s platform offers easy integration with external marketing automation tools, enabling you to expand your reach.
4. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
ERP systems provide large-scale B2B marketplaces with a centralized platform for managing various business functions, including finance, procurement, and human resources. Integrating ERP tools helps marketplaces streamline operations, improve data accuracy, and enhance cross-departmental collaboration. ERP systems are essential for handling complex workflows and ensuring smooth business processes across all areas. An ERP also enables real-time data sharing between departments, which helps in making informed decisions, tracking key performance indicators, and ensuring the scalability needed to support business growth and expansion.
With StoreHippo’s seamless integration capabilities, you can connect with leading ERP solutions to ensure that business processes run efficiently. This allows for real-time synchronization of data across various departments, reducing manual errors and improving workflow automation. Additionally, these integrations enable better overall business management, helping businesses scale effortlessly.
5. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A CRM system helps businesses manage customer relationships, track leads, and store important data about buyer interactions. In a B2B marketplace, CRM integration is essential for managing long-term relationships, especially with high-value clients. Providing instant customer support on your marketplace and B2B sales app can be a game changer for your business. Integrating with CRM tools and live chatbots helps in capturing leads, managing follow-ups, and analyzing customer behavior. By centralizing customer data, businesses can create personalized experiences, boost customer satisfaction, and drive repeat business in a highly competitive marketplace.
StoreHippo allows businesses to seamlessly integrate with popular CRM tools, ensuring that all customer interactions, from inquiries to order fulfillment, are efficiently managed. This integration enables real-time synchronization of customer data, enhancing relationship management. Additionally, CRM integration helps in personalizing marketing efforts by capturing key customer insights, allowing you to tailor communications and offers based on buyer behavior, leading to higher customer satisfaction and retention.
6. Analytics Tools
Well, data-driven insights are the heart and soul of optimizing the performance of a B2B marketplace. Analytics tools help businesses track customer behavior, monitor sales trends, and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Marketplace owners can analyze data on user engagement, best-selling products, abandoned carts, and conversion rates to make informed strategic decisions. These insights allow for more accurate forecasting, better resource allocation, and targeted marketing efforts. Advanced analytics tools can provide rich customer insights, helping B2B marketplaces forecast demand, tailor their offerings, and make proactive adjustments to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market.
StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions come pre-integrated with analytical solutions to help you analyze your customer segmentation and make data-centric marketing plans for overall business growth. With StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions, you can seamlessly integrate with several analytical tools like Google Analytics, Zoho, etc. that offer rich customer insights. With both built-in and external analytics capabilities, StoreHippo ensures that your business can easily access and interpret valuable data to enhance performance.
7. Taxation and Accounting Tools
For buisness-to-business marketplaces operating at large scale, integrating taxation and accounting tools is crucial. Such tools help maintain financial compliance, streamline accounting processes, automate tax calculations, and generate financial reports. You can meet regulatory requirements and avoid costly penalties with an advanced taxation and accounting tool. You can track revenue, monitor expenses, and gain a clear view of your business’ financial health. This integration is even more important if your B2B marketplaces operates in domestic as well as international markets.
StoreHippo comes pre-integrated with tax solutions. The powerful tax engine helps simplify and automatically charge taxes on your e-commerce sales. You can add different tax percentages for each GST component, and easily compute different GST taxes for various products and services offered by different dealers and distributors on your B2B sales app and marketplace. With StoreHippo’s powerful tax engine, you can add tax inclusive or exclusive pricing from backend and also create tax compliant invoices on your marketplace for international clients. You can also add multiple taxes under one main tax rule and club multiple taxes to make the final invoice look simpler to your customers. StoreHippo allows seamless integration with your preferred accounting tools, enabling you to streamline your financial processes and ensure compliance with mandatory regulations.
8. Payment Gateway
B2B payments are complex. Your clients look for a seamless transaction process on your marketplace. A frictionless payment gateway integration is critical for enabling secure, seamless transactions on B2B marketplaces. When you build a large-scale marketplace, you need robust gateways that can handle high transaction volumes, support multiple payment methods, and offer fraud prevention measures. By offering a range of payment options, you can enhance the customer experience and accommodate diverse buyer preferences. Advanced payment gateway integrations also ensure data security and compliance with industry standards, safeguarding sensitive information and building trust with customers.
StoreHippo comes with 60+ pre-integrated domestic and international payment solutions. You can offer an easy payment solution to your B2B customers by integrating with multiple payment gateways. When you enable your customers to choose from a wide choice of payment options like COD, net banking, cards, store credits, etc, they find buying easy on your B2B sales app and marketplace. By integrating with popular payment gateways StoreHippo allows you to offer your customers a frictionless payment experience, which is critical in maintaining trust and boosting conversions. You can also enable payment gateways based on the location of the buyers and offer multi-currency payments for your global clients
9. Logistics and Shipping Integrations
For B2B marketplaces dealing with large volumes and high customer expectations, logistics and shipping integrations become indispensable. These tools allow marketplaces to manage shipping options, track orders in real-time, and provide accurate delivery estimates. By connecting with multiple carriers, you can offer flexible shipping solutions, optimize delivery routes, and reduce costs. For businesses with international operations, shipping integrations support cross-border logistics. This ensures a smooth delivery process, enhances customer satisfaction, and helps you maintain a competitive edge by meeting the demand for fast, reliable shipping services.
StoreHippo offers 30+ pre-integrated shipping solutions to help you offer a seamless delivery solution to clients on your B2B sales app and marketplace. You can optimize the delivery charges by offering multiple shipping solutions on your ecommerce platform with StoreHippo. You can also integrate with local delivery partners of your choice to ensure faster order fulfillment. The inbuilt delivery boy solution from StoreHippo helps you manage your fleet of delivery boys on your B2B marketplace. StoreHippo supports real-time order tracking, automated shipping label generation, and multi-carrier support, allowing you to manage domestic and international shipments with ease. StoreHippo also enables sellers to choose shipping partners based on their preferences, ensuring flexibility and cost-effectiveness.
10. Dealer Management System (DMS)
A Dealer Management System (DMS) integration is essential for large-scale marketplaces that work with a network of dealers and distributors. This system centralizes dealer information, manages orders, and tracks sales performance across various locations, streamlining operations for both the marketplace and its dealers. With efficient DMS tools, you can facilitate better communication, ensure compliance with pricing and promotional guidelines, and provide real-time visibility into dealer inventory and sales data. You can enhance dealer relationships, improve supply chain efficiency, and optimize distribution. A DMS also supports performance analytics, helping marketplaces make data-driven decisions to boost dealer productivity and drive sales growth.
StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions make it easy to integrate DMS, allowing for efficient dealer management. Businesses can track dealer-specific inventory levels, monitor performance metrics, and optimize distribution channels. With this integration, businesses can streamline supply chain management and enhance dealer satisfaction.
Integrate Seamlessly With StoreHippo
StoreHippo helps marketplaces with seamless integrations of their own choice of software to build innovative solutions. With its headless APIs, StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions enable brands to manage their day-to-day business-operations with hassle-free and quick integration of multiple third party softwares like CRM, ERP, accounting, and so on. You can also integrate with multiple delivery partners, payment channels, chatbots, live chat etc. to offer a seamless shopping experience to your customers.
Conclusion
To build a B2B marketplace, you need a robust ecommerce solution that does more than just connect buyers and sellers, you need to create an ecosystem that simplifies and enhances every aspect of B2B business operations. By integrating with essential tools, you can streamline processes, optimize customer experiences, and set your business on an upward growth trajectory.
With the B2B eCommerce sector expanding rapidly, companies need to choose a comprehensive platform that supports seamless integrations. With StoreHippo B2B marketplace solutions, you can scale efficiently, meet the diverse needs of customers and vendors, and position yourself ahead of competitors.
Are you all set to integrate your B2B marketplace with Storehippo? Explore the wide range of features by starting 14-day free trial now.
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