In the world of wholesale ecommerce, delivering a top-notch buyer experience on your B2B online marketplace isn’t just a competitive advantage, it’s a must. 

Today’s B2B buyers expect the same seamless, user-friendly experience they enjoy with B2C brands.        

So, how can you make sure your business-to-business marketplace exceeds their expectations? 

Well, whether it’s streamlining the purchasing process, providing personalised recommendations, or offering reliable support, there are countless ways to impress your buyers. 

If you want to create a B2B marketplace that genuinely connects with your buyers, it's essential to leverage the right ecommerce solutions tailored to their needs. 

How to Enhance the B2B Buyer Experience In The AI Age

The B2B ecommerce landscape is rapidly evolving, driven by digital-first behaviour, rising buyer expectations, and the growing influence of AI-powered commerce. Today’s B2B buyers prefer remote, self-service purchasing journeys that are fast, personalised, and frictionless, similar to the B2C experiences they interact with daily.

Before we look into the sure-shot ways to engage buyers, here are a few key B2B ecommerce trends that highlight how buyer expectations are changing and why adopting AI-driven, buyer-centric marketplace strategies has become essential.

Digital-First B2B Buying

• 70% of B2B customers prefer remote business
• 35% of B2B buyers rated eCommerce as the most effective sales channel

Self-Service Preference

• 97% of B2B ecommerce are comfortable with self-service digital purchases
• 44% of millennials prefer no sales rep interaction during the purchase process

B2B Marketplace Growth

• $31.19 billion is the estimated GMV of globalB2B online marketplaces 
• 4X increase in the number of B2B marketplaces in past 3 years

Omnichannel & Mobile Commerce

• 10+ channels are used by B2B customers to connect with suppliers
• 70% of B2B buyers started using m-commerce channels more in the past 2-3 years

Demand for Personalisation

• 73% of B2B buyers now expect the same highlypersonalised, B2C like experiences 
• 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide personalised offers and recommendations

AI-Driven Growth

• 50% increase inleads and appointments with AI-driven sales processes 
• 10-12% average revenue increase with AI adoption in B2B Ecommerce

Rise of Digital Payments Scale

• 85% of B2B transactions are made via digital payments in 2024
• $27.8 trillion projected B2B digital payments market by 2032

Source: Kibo Commerce, Statista, McKinsey & Company, DHL Express, HelloRep,  Gartner, Persana AI, SNS Insider, 

In light of these evolving B2B buyer preferences, delivering an exceptional marketplace experience has become more important than ever. Buyers now expect intelligent discovery, personalised interactions, seamless digital payments, and consistent experiences across channels. This shift not only requires businesses to meet rising expectations but also to leverage AI as a core enabler of convenience, efficiency, and engagement. The right approach helps position your marketplace as a trusted partner, fostering loyalty and setting the foundation for long-term growth.

Wonder what the right approach is?

Let’s find out.

15 Ways to Deliver the Best Experience to Your B2B Marketplace Buyers

When it comes to B2B commerce, providing an outstanding and engaging buyer experience is critical for fostering customer loyalty and boosting repeat sales. Here are 15 effective strategies to help you deliver a seamless, engaging experience for your B2B marketplace buyers.

1. Optimise User Interface for Easy Navigation

Traditional B2B buying is long gone. A user-friendly design is essential for an intuitive buyer journey on your B2B online marketplace. Make sure your marketplace interface is easy to navigate, with clear menus, search functions, and accessible product categories. When you simplify your marketplace design, you minimize your buyer’s frustration and make it easier and quicker for them to find what they need.   

2. Provide Advanced Search and Filter Options

Modern B2B buyers do not like spending time on finding products. They need to locate specific products or services quickly. Offering advanced search and filter options on your B2B online marketplace allows them to quickly narrow down their choices based on various categories, specifications, and price ranges. This saves time and helps them discover relevant products more efficiently, thus increasing satisfaction. StoreHippo’s AI-powered semantic search further enhances search results by understanding buyer intent, not just keywords, helping users find the most relevant products faster, reducing search time, improving satisfaction, and accelerating purchase decisions.

3. Ensure Seamless Mobile Buying

Customers love the flexibility to shop from anywhere. No wonder 70% of B2B searches begin on mobile. A mobile-readyHaving a  B2B marketplace along with aor a dedicated B2B sales app gives buyers the flexibility to make purchases on the go. Mobile accessibility enables your buyers to check their product availability, place orders, and track their deliveries, etc, enhancing convenience and accessibility on your marketplace.

4. Offer Personalised Product Recommendations

When you offer personalised product recommendations to your B2B buyers, you elevate their shopping experience. Based on the browsing and purchase history of your buyers, you can understand their needs, highlight relevant items, and offer personalised deals. When you build a B2B marketplace, choose a robust ecommerce platform that offers you comprehensive tools to tailor the shopping experience and enhance your cross-sell opportunities.  StoreHippo’s AI-powered recommendations intelligently suggest products to buyers based on their past purchase behaviour and order history, driving higher order values, repeat purchases, and long-term buyer engagement. This level of personalisation not only enhances cross-sell and upsell opportunities but also strengthens buyer loyalty across the marketplace.

5. Enable Bulk Ordering and Volume Discounts

B2B buyers often order in large quantities. Offering seamless bulk ordering and volume discounts can significantly enhance your customer’s shopping experience. Bulk discounts add value to your buyers and motivate them to come back for more. You need a B2B ecommerce platform that supports bulk orders and offers real-time communication of any applicable discounts to encourage larger ticket sizes and long-term relationship with your marketplace.

6. Implement RFQ and other B2B Features

B2B buyers frequently require quotes before committing to large orders. A streamlined quoting system on your marketplace lets buyers request quotes easily and receive timely responses, cutting down on the long negotiation cycles. Clear and prompt quoting shows that your marketplace respects the buyer’s time, enhancing the overall shopping experience.

7. Provide Transparent Pricing and Clear Payment Terms

Transparent pricing on your B2B online marketplace is crucial for your buyers. Since B2B buying is all about bulk orders and involves large amounts, displaying prices clearly and offering flexible payment terms, become crucial to avoid confusion. When you provide multiple payment options and flexible terms and ensure that B2B buyers can choose what suits them best, you not only offer a smooth payment process, but also offer the best shopping experience. 

8. Integrate Secure, Versatile Payment Options

Security is critical in B2B transactions. Integrate a reliable, versatile payment gateway to provide a secure payment experience on your B2B online marketplace. When you enable your customers to pay in their preferred payment options like credit cards, bank transfers, and digital wallets, you enhance their confidence and make transactions more convenient for them.   

9. Make Buying Seamless For International Customers

If your marketplace serves international buyers, or you want to expand your business to new geographies, you need to localise your B2B marketplace. Well, you need to engage with the customers in their native language to convert better. It provides a localised shopping experience on your B2B online marketplace and ensures that buyers from various regions can understand product descriptions, pricing, and payment options in their native language and preferred currency.

10. Focus on Reliable Customer Support

Investing in strong customer support ensures that your buyers feel valued and get quick solutions to their issues. To deliver the best shopping experience, implement multi-channel support options, such as live chat, email, etc when you build a B2B marketplace. Fast and effective assistance to your buyers shows how committed you are to your buyers satisfaction. Enterprises can develop custom AI-powered bots tailored to their business workflows to enable instant query resolution, order assistance, and proactive support at scale. Fast and effective support strengthens buyer satisfaction, builds trust, and encourages long-term relationships.

11. Utilise Detailed Product Descriptions 

Detailed product descriptions and high-quality images of the products help buyers make informed decisions. When you include videos and 360-degree views of products, you enhance the shopping experience. Buyers can understand the products better, increasing the likelihood and reducing the uncertainty of shopping on your marketplace. Storehippo’s AI-powered B2B ecommerce platform simplifies cataloguing further by automatically generating accurate product descriptions, attributes, and tags at scale using product images.,It’s AI image enhancer,  Magic Edit, enables quick image enhancement, background cleanup, and visual consistency across the catalogue. Together, these capabilities ensure a more reliable, informative, and conversion-focused product experience across the marketplace.

12. Facilitate Easy Reordering and Subscription Options

For buyers who frequently order the same products, easy reordering and subscription options streamline the buying process and improve the overall shopping experience. When you build a B2B marketplace, implement a “reorder” button that simplifies purchasing for repeat buyers, saving them time and building loyalty. 

13. Offer Real-Time Inventory Updates

Accurate and real-time inventory updates prevent buyers from experiencing stock issues. When you integrate your inventory management with your B2B marketplace, you can seamlessly display up-to-date stock levels. This ensures that the buyers can place orders with confidence knowing the items are available.  

14. Streamline Order Tracking and Notifications

Order tracking is essential for buyers today, they like staying informed about their shipments. When you offer real-time tracking and automated notifications on your B2B online marketplace, you give your buyers visibility into their orders, reducing uncertainty and enhancing their overall experience

15. Gather Buyer Feedback and Act on It

Encourage buyers to share feedback about their experiences and then implement their suggestions. By listening to buyer feedback, you can make informed improvements to your marketplace, ensuring it continuously meets their needs and expectations.

How StoreHippo AI-Powered Ecommerce Platform Helps Deliver The Best Experience To Your B2B Marketplace Buyers

StoreHippo B2B ecommerce platform is built on MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) architecture, which gives B2B brands better creative freedom to implement unique business ideas and deliver the best buying experience. With a host of features and tools, you can build a B2B marketplaces that engages, attracts and converts better. 

StoreHippo comes with a host of B2B features to help you build a B2B marketplace. You can use enterprise-grade features like price overrides, IP or locations-based pricing, RFQ, inquiry generation forms etc. from StoreHippo. You can also add detailed product descriptions and multiple images to help your B2B clients make informed decisions. The robust inventory management feature from StoreHippo helps you manage and plan your inventory automatically. You can seamlessly get your inventory updated automatically after each new order, return or order cancellation.

StoreHippo is an AI-powered B2B ecommerce platform that enhances every stage of the B2B buying journey with AI-driven intelligence. AI acts as an operational backbone, supporting catalogue automation, intelligent search, personalised recommendations, image optimisation, and assisted buying experiences. This ensures faster discovery, relevant product visibility, and higher buyer satisfaction at scale. StoreHippo enables you to build AI-assisted, multilingual, and voice-enabled chatbots that support guided buying, instant query resolution, and contextual assistance throughout the buyer journey.

StoreHippo B2B solutions are built on mobile-first principle helping you leverage mobile commerce to offer a seamless buying experience to your buyers. You can seamlessly create multiple Android or iOS mobile apps right from your admin dashboard at zero additional costs. All B2B online marketplaces built on StoreHippo are PWA stores that look, feel, and work like mobile apps even on entry-level devices. Your buyers can seamlessly shop on their mobile devices with B2B sales app.

Using the decoupled headless architecture from StoreHippo, you can add multiple new customer touchpoints and go omnichannel. StoreHippo offers a central admin dashboard to help you manage multiple touchpoints from a single dashboard. With StoreHippo you also get rich customer insights from all the sales channels to help create data-driven business strategies. StoreHippo also offers the white-labelling feature for wholesale B2B brands. StoreHippo also offers faceted search features to help your B2B clients find products seamlessly on your marketplace. 

You can manage multiple distributors on your B2B online marketplace with StoreHippo’s multi-vendor marketplacesolutions. StoreHippo also offers separate vendor login and a unique dashboard for each vendor/distributor which helps them manage their businesses easily. You can also launch multiple B2B online stores with StoreHippo’s multi-store ecommerce solutions. Other features by StoreHippo, like location-based currency and language selection, location/vendor-based taxation, pricing, etc., help in taking your B2B business beyond borders.      

You can create a frictionless payment process on your B2B sales app and marketplace with 60+ pre-integrated payment gateways. StoreHippo also comes pre-integrated with 30+ logistics partners to help you streamline a seamless supply chain. StoreHippo also offers built-in delivery boy solutions to help brands manage their fleet of delivery boys. StoreHippo is designed for seamless integrations for enterprise B2B brands to seamlessly integrate with the best in breed ERP, CRM, accounting, marketing, and any other software or service of choice.  

Conclusion 

Delivering an exceptional shopping experience for B2B buyers is key to building trust and loyalty in today’s competitive landscape. When you focus on the unique needs of B2B buyers and offer them exactly what they want, you’re not just meeting their expectations; you’re exceeding them.

With AI-powered capabilities embedded across the buying journey businesses can further enhance speed, relevance, and engagement at scale.

StoreHippo B2B ecommerce platform empowers you to create a B2B online marketplace that is user-friendly, reliable, and tailored to the dynamic needs of your buyers. By combining enterprise-grade features with AI-driven intelligence, StoreHippo offers a 360-degree solution for fast-growing B2B brands. Prioritising buyer satisfaction through intelligent, data-driven experiences not only strengthens relationships but also lays the foundation for sustainable growth, setting your marketplace apart as a leader in B2B ecommerce.

Are you ready to deliver the best experience to your B2B marketplace buyers? Explore the wide range of features by booking your free demo today.

FAQs

Why is buyer experience now a core growth driver for B2B marketplaces?

Buyer experience directly impacts conversion, repeat purchases, and long-term revenue in B2B marketplaces. Today’s buyers expect fast discovery, self-service ordering, and consistent experiences across channels, similar to B2C platforms.
With StoreHippo B2B ecommerce platform, enterprises can design buyer-first journeys using AI-powered discovery, mobile-first storefronts, and centralised workflows, ensuring experience scales without increasing operational friction.

2. How does AI improve buyer experience on B2B marketplaces at scale?

AI enables B2B marketplaces to move from static journeys to intent-driven experiences. Instead of relying on fixed rules, AI analyses buyer behaviour, order patterns, and browsing history to personalise discovery and engagement.
StoreHippo’s AI-powered ecommerce platform embeds intelligence across catalogue automation, semantic search, personalised recommendations, and assisted buying, helping buyers find relevant products faster while reducing manual intervention.

3. Can self-service buying work alongside enterprise sales models in B2B?

Self-service buying accelerates the sales cycle by allowing buyers to research, compare, and order independently before engaging sales teams. This reduces dependency on manual interactions for routine purchases.
With StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions, enterprises can enable self-service features like RFQs, bulk ordering, tiered pricing visibility, and reordering while supporting negotiated pricing and sales-led workflows when required.

4. Why is mobile experience critical for modern B2B buyers?

B2B buyers increasingly browse catalogues, place repeat orders, and track shipments on mobile devices. Poor mobile experience leads to drop-offs and lost repeat business.
StoreHippo’s built-in mobile app builder enables enterprises to launch  Android and iOS B2B apps and PWA storefronts from a single backend, that too without coding and technical effort,  ensuring a consistent buyer experience across devices without additional development overhead.

5. How do enterprises personalise buyer journeys without managing multiple storefronts?

Personalisation at scale requires a single system that understands buyer behaviour across touchpoints. Managing separate catalogues or systems increases complexity and inconsistency.
StoreHippo B2B ecommerce software enables login-based, buyer-specific experiences using AI-driven recommendations, customer segmentation, and pricing controls, allowing enterprises to personalise journeys without duplicating infrastructure.

6. What role do payments and checkout play in B2B buyer experience?

Checkout friction is one of the biggest reasons for abandoned B2B orders. Buyers expect transparent pricing, secure payments, and flexible payment options aligned with their business needs.
StoreHippo is pre-integrated with 60+ payment gateways, enabling enterprises to offer flexible payment methods to customers. StoreHippo’s automated checkout workflows simplify high-value B2B transactions and build buyer confidence.

7. How can marketplaces ensure buyer confidence during large or repeat purchases?

Buyer confidence depends on predictability, i.e., accurate inventory, clear order status, and reliable fulfilment. Any uncertainty impacts trust and repeat buying.
StoreHippo’s unified B2B platform provides real-time inventory updates, automated order tracking, and proactive notifications, ensuring buyers always have visibility into their orders.

8. Why does platform architecture matter for delivering a consistent buyer experience?

Fragmented systems create inconsistent experiences and slow response times. At enterprise scale, buyer experience must be supported by a unified architecture.
StoreHippo is built on MACH and headless architecture, ensuring consistent experiences across web, mobile apps, PWA and other sales touchpoints. It allows enterprises to evolve buyer journeys without disrupting core operations.

9. How do multi-vendor B2B marketplaces maintain experience consistency across sellers?

Without unified control, multi-vendor marketplaces risk fragmented buyer experiences. Consistency requires platform-level controls with seller-level flexibility.
With StoreHippo’s multi-vendor B2B ecommerce solutions, multivendor marketplace owners can define experience standards centrally while enabling vendors to manage catalogues and fulfilment through dedicated dashboards, ensuring a uniform buyer experience at scale.

10. How do enterprises measure and continuously improve B2B buyer experience?

Buyer experience must be optimised continuously using real data, not assumptions. Metrics like repeat purchases, order frequency, and self-service adoption reveal experience gaps.
StoreHippo B2B ecommerce platform provides built-in analytics and integrates with tools like Google Analytics, enabling enterprises to track buyer behaviour and refine experiences using data-driven insights.