B2B E-commerce Marketplaces: A Triple Win for Hosts, Sellers, and Buyers
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[00:00:00] Brad Moss: Well,

[00:00:06] Darin Newbold: good day and welcome back to Commerce Today. My name is Darren Newbold as your host. And once again, we have an encore presentation with our very own Brad Moss coming back as our VP of sales. We're so excited to have you back, Brad.

[00:00:19] Brad Moss: Happy to be here, Darren. Thanks for including me. Very, very

[00:00:21] Darin Newbold: Well, we have a fun, fun conversation today.

[00:00:24] This one's going to be about B2B e commerce marketplaces, the triple win for host sellers and buyers. Sorry, I had to get a little radio voice in there for that. You could tell that one, that one went all right. So Enough with the radio voice and back to the, back to the really good stuff. So Brad, kind of give me a little bit of an overview or help our audience have an overview of what is, what are B2B marketplaces?

[00:00:46] Brad Moss: Sure. Thanks, Darren. Um, A B2B marketplace is really.

[00:00:51] Darin Newbold: a, um,

[00:00:52] Brad Moss: It's a common area for buyers and sellers of particular types of products or involved in a particular industry to all come together and buy and sell those goods that are germane to, again, that product type or that industry in a consistent place.

[00:01:08] Darin Newbold: So, kind of like a mall, if you will, for B2B type of companies to all come together and,

[00:01:15] Brad Moss: yeah, I mean, I like that analogy. It would be like a mall, but a mall that only is for the airline industry or only for the restaurant industry or only for something. So that's a good analogy.

[00:01:26] Darin Newbold: So we call this the triple threat or the triple win, I should say. So when we broke it up as host sellers and buyers, I guess, let's start out with what's the what's the benefit? To a host, what does that look like? And what's that all mean?

[00:01:41] Brad Moss: Sure, so somebody will host a business marketplace, right? And when they do, they're going to invite other sellers of like products that are, again, germane to a specific industry or product type to be involved in that.

[00:01:55] And when they do that, they're going to grow relationships with those folks. And that might be Um, advantageous down the road when they see trends in the industry, etc And again, some of those folks might end up needing the products that they're buying and they didn't have those relationships.

[00:02:10] So it really allows them to grow their network of similar companies within a space.

[00:02:16] Darin Newbold: Is there an example maybe of a type of a product or something that you've seen that might? Help kind of

[00:02:21] Brad Moss: one I was involved in, um, in years past was a client of ours. was in the airline industry, and so they opened up a marketplace, so they sold a very specific set of products that were used in the airline industry.

[00:02:36] But then they opened up this marketplace that allowed them to sell ancillary products, um, and then it brought together this whole community of folks in the aviation industry. That wanted to buy all sorts of products. The cool thing for a host is it gives you all sorts of analytics on trends and where things are moving.

[00:02:55] And if you want to do R and D in a different area, because you see it's a really hot space and there's a gap, in being able to supply those types of products. So there's a real advantage, uh, advantage to a host that wants to, uh, to, to open up a

[00:03:09] Darin Newbold: That's awesome. Okay. Well, that sounds like some, some cool stuff. So let's move to the sellers that are in this marketplace. How, um, how do they benefit and what's the drive for them?

[00:03:21] Brad Moss: Yeah, I mean, big revenue driver for, for sellers for a few reasons. Generally on marketplaces, B2B marketplaces specifically, businesses are there to conduct business transactions, right? So instead of buying onesies and twosies, you're there to buy three or four pallets, alright?

[00:03:38] So your spend per ticket is higher. you've got the ability to market to and message. Those folks that are involved in the marketplace about, you know, product updates, sales, inventory reductions, whatever the case may be. So there's a real advantage of being able to not broadcast, but narrowcast your message to these people that are on the marketplace because you you know, they're in your space, right?

[00:04:01] You know that they have a real interest of what it is that you're selling. so it's really an ability, again, I'll use the term narrowcast your message. to those, buyers of your goods about, um, you know, again, new products that are coming out, sales, whatever.

[00:04:16] Darin Newbold: Okay. So with this kind of, everybody comes to your online mall and as a seller, then do you have to worry about competition at all? I mean, do you have to, or, or does the host kind of make sure that. It is

[00:04:33] Brad Moss: host is going to monitor kind of who's in, you know, you hold the cards, right? And you can determine who's in and who's out, but competition is a good thing, right? It's a, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats. So it's an ability to see what's, what's hot in the space, what's not hot, where you might not be performing like you should from a product perspective.

[00:04:54] And so, you know, you can go into it scared or you can go into it as this is a great opportunity.

[00:05:01] Darin Newbold: Hmm. Okay.

[00:05:02] All right. So we've, uh, we've laid out the hosts. We've talked a bit about the sellers. So now from the buyer's perspective, now, again, this is buyers that are, that are businesses as opposed to, um, consumers. So it's a different, a whole different animal, if you will, and how you're in, how they approach it. So.

[00:05:23] Talk to me from that perspective.

[00:05:24] Brad Moss: So if you're a seller, let's say the legacy way of doing this, you, you've got a particular product type that you'd like to buy from a. Particular provider of that, of that product, you know, the old school way of doing it might have been getting on the phone, getting a customer service agent, listening to some hold music that you're not particularly a fan of that genre of music for a while, and then getting them to find, you know, your account and getting them to figure out what your preferred pricing is, et cetera.

[00:05:55] But if all of that is built into the marketplace, it's a few mouse clicks away.

[00:06:00] Darin Newbold: Okay, so you speed up hugely speed up the process

[00:06:04] Brad Moss: speed up the process. Able to get, you know, if it's built and architected in the right way, all the preferred pricing based on volume, based on contract terms, etc. are all built into the system so you don't have to find, you know, have somebody, you know, waiting through that on your side.

[00:06:20] You also have the ability to see what competitive products are out there that might better fit your need, right?

[00:06:26] Darin Newbold: And, is there, is there an ability to even negotiate some of the terms possibly and, and be able to do things better if there was maybe pricing above and beyond or you were trying to buy a, A much larger quantity than even you have in the past.

[00:06:41] Brad Moss: Yeah, again, it comes down to architecture, but if you architect it correctly and you see that there's a really big bulk order that's coming in, you build workflows into your marketplace to determine how are we going to adjust pricing on this? Does this involve human one on one interaction or can we build it all into the system?

[00:06:58] But all of that is, is, it's open game, right? You can build it however you want it, so you can have as much or as little friction as you want. As you want the experience?

[00:07:06] Darin Newbold: That's awesome. So, um, maybe going back to your example of the, the air airline or aircraft, uh, uh, type of parts and, and those kinds of things, how does that, I guess, maybe a little bit more of a detailed an example of how does that, if we kind of put it all together, hey, we're walking into the aircraft mall of, of stuff, what might you see and might, what, what might you see What might that look like and how would that maybe all come together in, uh, in a B2B marketplace?

[00:07:36] Brad Moss: You know, think of your typical B2C marketplace and what's that, what that looks like. But if you go to some of the bigger known B2C MAR or B2C marketplaces, we won't name names here, but you can get shoes and books and electronics.

[00:07:51] And close and, you know, the list goes on and on and on. If we're using the aviation example, you go in and there's, do you want parts? Do you want, um, lubricants? Do you want fuels? Do you want whatever? And so it's very tailored and you know exactly what it is that, that your particular business is looking for.

[00:08:11] And so now if we go into, you know, the lubricant side, do you need wheel lubricant? Do you need stuff to go, you know, there's. A bunch of them, but at least now that's all you're looking for, right? And you know what you're set up to buy and you can go and click on it. You can also have if it's again, if it's architected correctly, same things as you would find on a B2C marketplace, right?

[00:08:31] Like the things that you normally buy on a regular basis, right? And you can set them up to to refill. On a regular cadence every week, every month, every quarter, whatever the case may be, or, um, you know, you've just got a list of frequently bought products and you can go in and say, you know, I don't need as many this month as I did last month, just change the quantity, hit buy, boom, everything's done.

[00:08:53] Darin Newbold: Interesting. So now, as I kind of look at it, going back to the advantages of that host, with the host being able to have all of the, all of that analytics, all of that knowledge of the different things that are going on. they can see what's happening and see what's, what's going on through the whole thing and, and really have an understanding and in a way that even becomes a product in and of itself of being able to sell that information and that knowledge to the different sellers on the, in the marketplace.

[00:09:26] Brad Moss: Yeah, you know, I hit on this earlier. Data is the new bacon, right? So everybody wants data. And so if you host this marketplace, you've got access to all the data. You can see trends. You can see what's working. A bunch of the functionality that you would see on a B2C website, in terms of a user journey, etc All that information is available to you. So you've got a much wider lens view of what's going on in the space. Now, because you've got all these buyers and sellers of all these similar, you know, industry specific items, and it, um, gives you a wealth of information of what's hot, what's not, what's trending, what's trending up, what's trending down, etc 

[00:10:02] Darin Newbold: Okay. Well, as we, as we put this all together, kind of, what are the, what are the keys that we want, uh, want our listeners to walk away from around B2B marketplaces? What's, uh, what's the big things? I mean, I know we've hit on them, but let's kind of wrap it up as we, uh, as we land this plane, as they might

[00:10:21] Brad Moss: Oh my gosh, well played Maestro.

[00:10:24] Darin Newbold: Um.

[00:10:25] Brad Moss: you know, again, it's, it's where business is moving.

[00:10:28] So start looking at them. There's a lot of options in terms of marketplaces. There are companies that sell marketplace platforms, there's build your own etc. There's pluses and minuses obviously that come with both of those so, make sure that the juice is worth the squeeze in terms of how much you're going to invest in it, whether you're going third party or building your own versus what you're going to get out of it.

[00:10:51] But if you're the host, the data that you're going to get out of it is going to be invaluable the relationships 

[00:10:56] you're going to get by increasing

[00:10:58] the number of sellers and buyers that are on there. So now you've got more relationships with more companies that you can leverage down the road in different ways. So all those are huge advantages.

[00:11:08] Darin Newbold: Gotcha. Gotcha. All right. Well, and we also, I know in our, uh, in our research, I know, as you mentioned, there's, uh, there are some platforms out there. There's plugins that go into the major, uh, the major e commerce platforms.

[00:11:20] I know we found plugins for Adobe commerce and, and those things that are great solutions. So we definitely, uh, definitely be in a place to, uh, Love to help people and help answer that. We'd love to hear about your experiences as well. If you have a B2B marketplace, we'd love to hear from you. So feel free to send us a note or, uh, shoot us, shoot us a message and let us know, uh, know what's happening.

[00:11:42] Well, Brad, thank you again for, uh, coming and join us for, uh, for your Encore presentation. And with that, we, uh, we appreciate y'all being here for another episode of Commerce Today. Until the next time. Take care.

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