Basics of Multi-vendor marketplace website: A simple roadmap for a B2B business

Webnexs
3 min readJan 18, 2021

At any level, the vision of any eCommerce platform is to build and manage the whole process of a B2B business.

Normally, if someone is about trade or business, they either think of import and export businesses or doing conventional retail business.

Those in general trade is about the exchange of goods/services or the value between buyers and sellers. Fundamentally, the exchange of goods and value is the thing that everyone carries before kick-starting a trade — including purchase, marketing, taxation, freight, and logistics. It is like a complete cycle to take over that is commonly associated with the trade. This is how a typical B2B business works everywhere.

The process of exchange of goods may hinder your B2B business growth, so the only way to improve the workflow and facilitate the exchange of goods and services in the B2B segment is through the complete integration between the buyers and sellers.

Many B2B marketplace business solution providers had and still spending a lot of time on improving the B2B business to better scale.

How do they do that?

All their intention is to automate the whole process of exchange of goods and services like auto-onboarding of partners, smooth transactions, product and catalog management.

The concepts that we’re about to discuss are more important for wholesale and drop-ship relationships where either of the parties. It includes the party that deals with thousands of partners and joining up with that overhead relationships.

Here let’s discuss the technology to make the multi-vendor marketplace website with a stunning platform — kick-starting a B2C marketplace website that integrates with multiple sellers and brands and enables faster business growth through futuristic technology.

Multi-vendor marketplace website — B2C & B2C segment

Basics of Multi-vendor marketplace website: A simple roadmap

Multi-vendor marketplace website is a B2B eCommerce platform that helps to build their own multi-vendor marketplaces that allow the various vendors to sell and buyers around the globe to buy behind the scenes.

Each online multi-vendor marketplace platform comprises two components — the front and back end.

On the front-end side, it’s the digital storefront with products and categories that been uploaded by the third-party vendors.

This is the B2C component of the eCommerce platform where Amazon is the best example to mention in this segment. While Amazon has first-party products that it is responsible for supplying, most of its catalog comprises products from third-party brands who are looking for distribution.

On the back-end of the multi-vendor marketplace software is an integration platform that allows interacting with multiple vendors and buyers usually via the internet.

There is usually a warehouse kind of inventory of product, order, and inventory information that place between the two parties and break-up the required information to the relevant party at the correct time. As I said before, all these processes can be automated with technology that eases the entire business flow.

Example for Multi-vendor marketplace platform

For example, when a vendor is onboarded to an online multi-vendor platform, the platform should sync products and the available inventory to the retailers’ marketplace and make them ready for delivery.

Similarly, when the seller receives an order, the line items of products should get the return to the vendor(s) from where they can fulfill the order.

An online multi-vendor marketplace is more than a B2C storefront. Because it is a collection of networks that comprises various elements like curation, integration, and automation together to enable commerce on both sides.

With advanced marketplace solution, all the pillars of the business platform like retailers, publishers, and distributors can merge all their sellers and their niche products and services in a single platform called a multi-vendor marketplace website.

I hope you’re curious to learn how stuff works. Click here for the free demo with an expert multi-vendor marketplace business team.

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