7 must have features in your B2B marketplace app

Can you run your ecommerce business without building your marketplace apps?

Certainly not! 

And your B2B marketplace is no exception!

Yes, to engage and convert your B2B buyers, you need to build the marketplace apps, the channel most loved by your clients.

Wondering what makes us say so?

Look for yourself:

• 70% of B2B searches start on mobile apps
• 40% of B2B ecommerce sales are driven by mobile devices
• 73% of companies using marketplace apps for sales saw a gain in their overall productivity
• 78% of B2B brands believe that mobile commerce is a future driver of their industry
• 90% of B2B organizations have moved to digital selling

Source: Think With Google

Well, as per the data, this increasing demand for B2B marketplace apps seems like the winning formula for your wholesale ecommerce business. Yes, with a B2B app, you can unlock new growth opportunities and explore a wider audience like never before. 

Not convinced yet? Keep reading the space for more detailed insights on B2B mobile apps and how to build one for your business.

Benefits of having marketplace apps for your B2B business

To resonate better with your B2B buyers, business-to-business enterprises need advanced marketplace apps that offer features like self-exploration and self-service. The modern digital age buyers peep into their smartphones multiple times a day. With the best B2B marketplace app at their fingertips, they can make quick buying decisions and become better with your brand. 

Here is how B2B brands can benefit by building their mobile apps 

• Offers a direct channel to connect and sell to your buyers 
• Helps you reach newer markets and cater to a wider audience
• Boosts brand engagement as the customers can now shop on the go
• Helps offer personalized buyer journeys and product recommendations
• Boost the order value and mobile shopping leads to bigger ticket sizes and more impulsive purchases
• Boosts customer loyalty by increasing the brand engagement time on marketplace apps
• Quickens the transition to omnichannel selling with apps and PWA stores
• Access to better insights into client’s behavioral data to help make strategic business strategies

Building mobile apps is imperative to streamline and enhance the business opportunities. However, before you start designing your B2B mobile app, you need enterprise marketplace solutions that come with advanced enterprise-grade features not only for your business but also for your customers. The app should be tailored to meet the needs of both ends of the industry. 

StoreHippo's B2B ecommerce solution comes with an inbuilt mobile apps builder to help you launch your mobile apps in record time. You can build your Android and iOS apps directly from the dashboard without any coding required. 

7 Must have features in your B2B marketplace apps

With the tremendous rise in the power of mobile commerce, each and every business is exploring different ways to connect and engage with their customers. Let us look at the top 7 features that can make your B2B marketplace app stand out amongst others.

Engaging design and easy navigation

A mobile app that is attractive and designed to convert buyers goes a long way. If you are looking for exponential growth in your B2B business, you need to go beyond creating a mobile app to creating a seamless and engaging buying journey for your customers. The B2B buyers would not entertain a long waiting time, and so providing easy navigation through your marketplace app becomes necessary. 

StoreHippo comes with a rich design themes library to help you play around and create professional-looking designs for your B2B apps. It comes with an easy drag-and-drop tool that allows you to create the most engaging designs without the need for any coding. You can also mix and match different design elements to create a customized design for your app.  StoreHippo enterprise marketplace solutions also provide faceted search and advanced pricing filters to help customers narrow down their search to exact matches, making the shopping experience seamless.

Tiered pricing

Every B2B buyer is price sensitive, and they look forward to multiple rounds of negotiation before finalizing a deal. When you build a B2B enterprise marketplace app, you can offer tiered pricing that helps you boost your profit margins. For example, if your buyers are looking to buy 50 tables, 100 tables, or 150 tables, offering 3 different levels of pricing say $100 /table for up to 50 tables, $ 85/table for 100 tables and $75/table for 100 tables or more makes your negotiations faster.

With StoreHippo’s inbuilt tiered pricing, you can quickly implement and manage multi-pricing on your marketplace. You can quickly set-up multi-level prices like volume-based pricing, rule-based prices, min-max quantity-based pricing, customer segment or customer-specific pricing to attract B2B buyers from various different segments. 

Ease of getting quotes and comparative prices

The B2B buyers today are tired of long sales cycles. Wondering what’s the way out? Well, you can make selling faster by automating the sales cycle on your B2B marketplace. As B2B buyers usually make purchases in bulk, you need to make it easy for the sellers to get quotes and compare prices.

StoreHippo comes with a host of enterprise-grade features to help you streamline and automate the entire process. Your business-to-business buyers can quickly get quotes and compare prices of the products on your ecommerce app. StoreHippo offers RFQ, MOQ. Buyers on your marketplace app can make informed decisions faster and cut down on negotiation time with these powerful features. You can also provide your customers with customized pricing on your marketplace by engaging in one-to-one conversations. 

Self service and features to connect with sellers

Did you know that 97% of B2B buyers prefer a completely digital self-serve model over sales-rep-driven buying? It's true that there is no way you can completely substitute a sales-person with the self-service model. You can however introduce forms and features to eliminate the need for a salesperson at every step of the selling process on your marketplace app. 

StoreHippo comes with a unique feature to place custom forms at places where your B2B customers are more likely to interact with you. These forms will also give you quick insights into customer behavior adding to the rich data source. With a detailed response from your potential client, you can have your support and sales team follow up with them with personalized solutions to their inquiries. StoreHippo enterprise marketplace solution also offers an inbuilt 3-party buyer-seller-admin chat to facilitate faster negotiations, pricing comparison, tiered pricing etc.

Seamless checkout with multiple payment options

A B2B marketplace that offers a seamless checkout process to its clients goes a long way. The business-to-business transactions can be overwhelming as it includes rounds of payments, includes several people and requires frequent contacts with the sellers. Amongst all this, a B2B buyer looks for a simple and seamless payment process that can make their buying easier. 

StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions bring together a number of payment options to help the buyers handle the complex payment process seamlessly. StoreHippo offers 60+ pre-integrated payment gateways that include credit and debit cards, netbanking, UPI, digital wallets and also comes with a provision for B2B wallet and credit management.

Order management and tracking

With the bulk order coming in on your marketplace, you need features that can help you in processing and managing those bulk orders efficiently. And managing your orders and tracking them should not be a resource-intensive or time-taking task but should flow seamlessly. 

The B2B ecommerce solution from StoreHippo makes it easy for the vendors on your marketplace to run their business with a separate vendor dashboard for each seller. The vendors can manage their products, orders, inventory, shipping, returns etc hassle-free. With the inbuilt seller ledger and adaptive payment feature from StoreHippo, you can get access to complete details about transactions, payables, invoices etc. 

User management

You can set your wholesale business for a growth uptick by digitizing your whole setup. However, you need a B2B software that offers a one-stop solution for building, running and managing your marketplace app. 

With StoreHippo you can assign multiple user roles to your internal team and secure your portal by restricting access to different levels of users. However, you have complete control over the different levels of users and only the admin can create similar user roles for different users. Along with this, you can also offer your clients a rich dashboard to easily manage their orders, addresses, wishlist, seller chats etc. 

StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions not only makes your app easy to use but also easy to manage and grow. StoreHippo comes with 300+ enterprise-grade features and 120+ integrations that help you streamline your order fulfillment and manage every aspect of your wholesale ecommerce business smoothly. StoreHippo also offers a common admin panel that helps the admin access different sections of the app like product wishlist, order tracking etc. 

Conclusion

A marketplace app is an integral part of every ecommerce business. With smartphones taking up most of the time in everyone’s lives, all small and large businesses are looking for opportunities to boost their sales. 

With the above mentioned must-have features, B2B marketplaces can take their enterprise businesses up many notches. The next-generation technology by StoreHippo offers a multitude of enterprise-grade features and B2B ecommerce solutions that make handling your business seamless.  

Are you all set to build a B2B enterprise marketplace and take your B2B marketplace to the next level with apps and PWA stores? Explore the StoreHippo platform by starting your 14-day free trial now. 

FAQ 

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1. Can we get the provision in the B2B marketplace app to show real-time stock availability to buyers?

Yes, StoreHippo’s advanced yet simplified inventory management system helps you manage and plan your inventory automatically. You can get your inventory updated automatically after each new order, return, or order cancellation as you build a B2B enterprise marketplace app with StoreHippo. You can show real-time stock availability by setting up options like ”out of stock” so your customers do not place an order for products that are not available.

2. Can I build my B2B marketplace app in different languages?

Yes, you can seamlessly build your B2B marketplace app in multiple languages with StoreHippo enterprise marketplace solutions. As 75% of the customers like to buy from brands that sell in their native language, it becomes important to communicate with the customers in multiple languages. StoreHippo comes with built-in support for 100+ different languages including RTL (Right to Left) languages like Arabic and Hebrew. The easy-to-use multilingual solutions from StoreHippo help you translate your marketplace apps into different languages. With the automatic and manual translation control, you can translate your app into different languages in just a few easy steps.

3. Can I integrate my marketplace app with the existing software being used by my business?

Yes, in just a few easy steps. StoreHippo helps you to seamlessly integrate with your existing software on your B2B marketplace app. Built on API-based architecture, StoreHippo enables hassle-free integrations with multiple software and tools of your choice. As you integrate with your choice of software, you can perform various business operations efficiently. You can choose to integrate with software like CRM, ERP, accounting, multiple delivery partners, etc. to handle large-scale B2B business. You can also integrate with chatbots, live chat, etc to be available for your customers round the clock.

4. Can I track sales and buyer behavior on my B2B marketplace app?

Yes, for an upward growth trajectory of your B2B business, you need to track your sales and accordingly plan business strategies. StoreHippo B2B marketplace solutions help you track your sales and buyer behavior with its host of analytical tools. You can get access to rich customer insights and make data-driven marketing plans by seamlessly integrating your B2B app with data tools like Google Analytics, Zoho, etc. You can also create personalized landing pages and custom forms to capture customer data using StoreHippo’s built-in form builder when you build a B2B enterprise marketplace with StoreHippo. 

5. What features will my sellers get to manage inventory and orders on the B2B marketplace app?

StoreHippo offers a well-rounded, automated, and feature-rich Order Management System and inventory management solutions to help your sellers carry out their business operations seamlessly. Your sellers can manage products in their backend and storefront with time-saving and simple features from StoreHippo. They can seamlessly add, delete, edit, import, export, search or filter, publish or unpublish single or multiple products in just a few clicks with enterprise marketplace solutions from StoreHippo. With built-in OMS from StoreHippo your sellers can also create a streamlined order fulfillment cycle to build customers' trust and loyalty, thus boosting conversions on your B2B app. 

6. Can the marketplace app handle differential pricing of a B2B set-up?

Yes, when you build your B2B marketplace app with StoreHippo, you can seamlessly handle differential pricing. StoreHippo helps you set-up multi-level pricing on your B2B app. You can offer varied pricing like volume-based, rule-based, min-max quantity-based, customer segment, or customer-specific pricing to attract B2B buyers from various segments. 

7. What are the marketing tools offered by the B2B ecommerce solutions for my B2B app?

StoreHippo enterprise marketplace solutions offer a host of marketing tools for your B2B app. You can seamlessly carve a niche in the ecommerce landscape with various marketing tools from StoreHippo. You can create multi-level discounts and coupons on your app with the built-in powerful discount engine. StoreHippo helps you recover abandoned carts by using the push notifications feature. You can send out personalized notifications and create personalized coupons to attract, engage, and convert customers. With the built-in SEO tools from StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions, you can rank your business higher on SERPs and gain organic traffic by creating unique URLs, meta descriptions, meta titles, meta tags, etc.   

8. Does the marketplace app offer seamless delivery solutions for bulk orders?

Yes, as you build your marketplace app with StoreHippo, you can automate your shipping and logistics process to offer seamless deliveries for bulk orders. StoreHippo comes with 30+ pre-integrated logistic partners to streamline your shipping solutions. You can also choose to integrate with the shipping solution of your choice to offer a quick and seamless delivery to your B2B buyers. StoreHippo solutions help import bulk orders, update order status, assign delivery partners, customize the shipping rates, etc in just a few simple steps. With StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions, you can centrally control all the orders from different platforms. With the built-in delivery management solution, you can also manage your fleet of delivery boys and create a hassle-free supply chain for bulk orders.

9. Do I need paid apps and extensions to manage orders, deliveries, etc on my marketplace app?

No, you do not need paid apps and extensions to manage your orders, deliveries, etc on your marketplace app with StoreHippo. As you build a B2B enterprise marketplace app with StoreHippo, you get access to 300+ built-in features and 120+ integration to help you manage all your business operations seamlessly. You can however choose to integrate with one or more third-party apps and extensions of your choice with StoreHippo’s seamless integrations. 

10. Is it possible to keep the users’ data safe when we build our marketplace app?

Yes, it is possible to keep your users’ data safe when you build your B2B marketplace app with StoreHippo. You can secure all the sensitive information of your customers by building a PCI-DSS-compliant ecommerce platform with StoreHippo. It offers multi-level security features and tools like audit logs and free SSL certificates.