In today's fast-paced digital world, having the right B2B apps can be the difference between barely getting by and running a thriving wholesale marketplace. 

Imagine a seamless system that automates tedious processes, improves communication, and ensures that your customers have the smoothest buying experience possible. 

That’s exactly what the right apps can do for your business. 

The competition is fierce, and without these game-changing tools, your wholesale platform might just get left behind. 

When you build the right B2B apps, you can streamline your business operations, improve customer engagement, and ultimately boost conversions. 

Let’s explore five essential business-to-business apps that can transform your operations and position your business for success in the digital age.

How B2B Apps Enable Enterprises To Accelerate Growth

Mobile apps have become the backbone of modern B2B marketplaces, enabling enterprises to reach buyers anytime, streamline operations, and deliver seamless purchasing experiences. 

Let’s explore how the role of mobile apps has evolved over the years:

• 70% of B2B searches now begin on mobile apps
• 40% of B2B ecommerce sales are driven by mobile devices
• 73% of companies using marketplace apps report productivity gains
• 78% of B2B brands view mobile commerce as a key future growth driver
• 90% of B2B organisations have adopted digital selling models
• ~80% of B2B buyers use mobile devices throughout the entire purchase journey
• 90% of B2B buyers with positive mobile experience purchase again from the same vendor 
• 30% faster reorders reported for B2B brands using mobile apps

Source: Think With Google, Gartner

The data clearly marks the shift toward mobile-first B2B buying. Enterprises that put mobile commerce at the core of their strategy achieve long term growth by helping their buyers and sellers get the benefits of buying and selling from anywhere, anytime. Mobile channel is now shaping how B2B transactions are discovered, evaluated, and executed. Let’s look at the must-have B2B apps every wholesale marketplace needs to operate efficiently and scale with confidence.

5 Must-Have B2B Apps for Your Wholesale Marketplace

B2B apps play a crucial role in transforming traditional B2B business operations by enhancing collaboration and automating processes. B2B apps help multi vendor marketplaces not only facilitate smoother transactions but also empower them to respond swiftly to market demands and customer needs. 

Here are five must-have B2B apps for any wholesale marketplace:

1. B2B Marketplace App for Buyers

The cornerstone of any wholesale marketplace is its customer-facing app, designed specifically for buyers. Your clients can use this app to browse and purchase goods from your wholesale marketplace with ease. 

With features like tailored product catalogues, search filters, seamless bulk ordering, personalised product recommendations, and easy checkout, this app makes it simple for businesses to make bulk purchases. It serves as the front-end interface for customers, helping them track orders, access personalised recommendations, and engage with suppliers in real-time. You can enhance the buyer experience with a B2B marketplace app for buyers, enabling companies to navigate your offerings more effectively and thus drive higher sales.

Benefits of using a B2B app for buyers: 

• Simplifies bulk purchasing with easy access to product catalogues and quick checkout.
• Enhances user experience through personalised recommendations and real-time tracking.
• Streamlines order management by enabling businesses to track, manage, and reorder products effortlessly.
• Fosters better supplier relationships by providing direct communication channels between buyers and vendors.
• Supports decision-making with features like product comparisons, reviews, and pricing visibility

StoreHippo B2B marketplace platform offers an intuitive interface for clients to search for different products, send their RFQs, receive quotes, and select or reject given buyers for making a purchase. Buyers can smoothly purchase on the B2B apps built with StoreHippo’s fast-loading PWA sites and mobile apps. Built on mobile-first MEAN stack architecture, your B2B clients can experience fast browsing and checkout experience. 

2. Sub-store B2B App

If you are a B2B brand with a wider presence across product lines and geographies, having a single, one-size-fits-all wholesale store may not suffice. You need to have multiple targeted sub-stores to build a solid brand presence. Whether it's a sub-store dedicated to a specific region like India, Germany, or France, or one focused on a niche such as industrial goods, fashion, or grocery, having dedicatedwholesale makeplace sub stores for different audience segments enables your business to target clients better. You can grow quickly by catering to the unique needs of your customer base via multiple sub-stores. To maximise the benefits from this localised approach and give your buyers access to products tailored to their needs your enterprise brand should invest in making B2B sales apps for different sub-stores. 

Benefits of building a sub-store B2B app: 

• Enables targeted customer engagement by offering region-specific or category-specific product selections.
• Boosts buyer satisfaction through localised product offerings that cater to unique market needs.
• Improves sales performance by tailoring marketing and promotions to different audience segments.
• Supports faster business expansion by creating dedicated stores for emerging markets or niche products.
• Enhances brand flexibility by adapting to regional demand variations and industry-specific needs.

StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace builder helps create multiple apps for different regions, target audiences, product lines etc right from your admin dashboard at no additional cost or coding. You can also enable multilingual support in different apps to engage with customers in their native language. For example, you can create a different B2B app for your customers in Canada, and a different app for B2B clients in India. StoreHippo also enables wholesale brands to build multiple location-specific sub stores and then manage them with a common central admin. 

3. Admin B2B App

For enterprise-level management, building an adminB2B app becomes essential. Running a large-scale, wholesome B2B marketplace demands efficient oversight and management. The Admin B2B app is designed to give admins and managerial teams full control over the platform’s operations. With an admin app, you can manage product listings, monitor sales performance, approve vendor requests, and handle customer service queries, all from one centralised dashboard. You also get access to real-time data analytics, helping you make informed decisions on inventory management, pricing strategies, and sales forecasting. 

Benefits of admin B2B app: 

• Centralises business management by allowing admins to oversee all marketplace operations from a single platform.
• Provides real-time analytics for informed decision-making on sales, inventory, and vendor performance.
• Simplifies vendor and product management with tools to monitor listings, approve vendors, and manage orders.
• Improves workflow efficiency by automating administrative tasks and streamlining communication across departments.
• Enhances operational control by enabling admins to manage multiple sub-stores, regions, or product categories effectively

StoreHippo comes with a built-in admin app that enables various admin teams to look into the day-to-day business. The multi vendor marketplace admin can manage the business better with standardisation, modernisation, and automation at multiple levels. StoreHippo admin app gives better business control with a clear overview of all vendors' inventories, order RFQs,orders, shipments, etc. StoreHippo B2B apps offer rich customer insights for data-driven decision-making for business growth. You can go for personalised customer targeting with in-app features like wishlists, push notification etc. You can recover abandoned carts with automated follow-up mail. With the built-in discount engine, you can set multi-level personalised discounts for your B2B clients. You can also change the themes of your wholesale marketplace admin app with StoreHippo’s rich design theme and easy-to-use design drag-and-drop tool. 
       

4. Vendor B2B App

When you are running a wholesale multi vendor marketplace, you also need to make B2B selling easy for your vendors. With a vendor B2B app, your vendors can efficiently control inventory, update products, and track orders. For enterprise businesses like yours working with numerous vendors, this app ensures consistency and allows suppliers to maintain their stores while delivering exceptional service to your wholesale clients. Vendors can seamlessly overview their business details, have access to valuable insights into customer preferences helping them optimise their operations for growth.

Benefits of a Vendor B2B App:

• Simplifies product management by allowing vendors to easily update listings, prices, and stock levels.
• Streamlines order processing with real-time notifications and tracking for incoming orders on the wholesale marketplace.
• Improves sales insights by offering detailed analytics on product performance and customer behaviour.
• Enhances communication with direct channels for vendors to connect with buyers and resolve queries.
• Boosts operational efficiency by enabling vendors to manage their entire store, including promotions and discounts, from one app.

StoreHippo offers an easy-to-use B2B app for vendors to help them manage their products, inventory, price requests, fulfilment, and more. Vendors on your marketplace can handle business from anywhere with StoreHippo’s built-in mobile app for vendors. With the comprehensive vendor management solutions, even novice sellers can easily onboard on the platform. StoreHippo offers a separate vendor dashboard for each seller to manage their complete business independently. StoreHippo also creates a separate seller page for each of the vendors, giving them undivided attention from the buyers. Vendors can leverage AI-powered cataloguing to automate product tagging, categorisation, and attribute mapping, making large inventories easy to manage. Enterprises can also build custom AI assistants to support sellers with onboarding, operational queries, issue resolution, and daily workflows, ensuring faster, smarter, and more scalable vendor operations.

5. Delivery Boy B2B App

Logistics management is crucial for any enterprise-level marketplace, and when you deal with B2B, bulk deliveries become a challenge. With a custom delivery boy B2B app, you can simplify the delivery processes and enable vendors to assign tasks, monitor delivery agents, and track real-time updates. This app allows vendors to assign delivery tasks, track the real-time location of delivery agents, and ensure that orders reach customers on time. With features like GPS navigation, order status updates, and digital proof of delivery, it helps streamline the entire delivery process. Vendors can also communicate directly with delivery agents to ensure smooth, on-time deliveries, thus enhancing customer satisfaction.    

Benefits of the delivery boy B2B app:

• Improves delivery tracking by providing real-time location updates for efficient order fulfilment on your multi vendor marketplace.
• Enhances communication with seamless interaction between vendors, delivery agents, and customers. 
• Increases delivery efficiency through optimised routes and task management for faster deliveries.
• Provides proof of delivery with digital signatures and photo verification to ensure successful order completion.
• Reduces logistical errors by automating the assignment of delivery tasks and monitoring progress in real-time.

StoreHippo B2B app solutions for delivery boys help you manage your own fleet of carriers and delivery boys for hyperlocal deliveries with a comprehensivedelivery management system. You can streamline your shipments with faster and error-free deliveries. You can seamlessly onboard, manage, and track your delivery agents right from your admin dashboard. With StoreHippowholesale marketplace solutions for mcommerce, you can assign a unique set of delivery boys to each seller or store. 

How AI-Powered StoreHippo Core Gives a Winning Edge to B2B Enterprises

AI has become a critical enabler for modern B2B marketplaces, helping enterprises manage complexity, improve buyer experiences, and scale operations efficiently. As B2B buying journeys grow more digital, mobile-first, and expectation-driven, AI plays a central role in automating workflows, personalising interactions, and enabling faster decision-making across the marketplace lifecycle.

Here's what the number shows:

• 50% increase in B2B leads driven by AI adoption (McKinsey)
• 60-70% reduction in B2B sales call duration with AI-assisted workflows (McKinsey)
• ~30% higher B2B conversion rates through AI-powered personalisation (McKinsey)
• 13-15% revenue growth reported by B2B companies leveraging AI ( Persana AI)
• 47% faster ecommerce purchases when buyers are assisted by AI (Hello Rep)
• 5-10% improvement in customer satisfaction from AI-driven personalisation (Bloom Reach)
• ~40% productivity boost expected by 2035 through AI adoption (Accenture)

Together, these data points to a clear shift: B2B marketplaces that embed AI into their core operations are better positioned to convert faster, operate efficiently, and scale with confidence. As buying journeys become more complex and expectation-driven, AI-native platforms will define how enterprise B2B commerce competes and grows.

This is where an AI-native B2B ecommerce platform plays a critical role, enabling smarter decision-making, higher efficiency, and scalable personalisation. StoreHippo’s AI-powered ecommerce platform automates complex B2B operations, personalises buyer journeys, and optimises marketplace performance. Its AI-driven cataloguing automates product tagging, categorisation, attribute mapping, and content optimisation, while Magic Edit enhances product images for professional, market-ready visuals. Intent-based search and intelligent recommendations go beyond keywords to match products with buyers’ past orders, browsing history, and buying intent. Custom AI-driven buying assistants guide B2B buyers through complex purchasing decisions, reducing friction and shortening sales cycles. Custom AI assistants can also be developed for buyers, sellers, and internal teams to streamline onboarding, manage operations, resolve issues, and handle daily workflows efficiently.

Conclusion 

For a thriving wholesale marketplace like yours, the right B2B apps can be the game-changer for your business needs. From streamlining operations to enhancing customer engagement, you can stay ahead in the fast-paced ecommerce market. Whether you’re managing buyers, vendors, or logistics, each app plays a vital role in optimising your marketplace's efficiency and boosting sales, especially when powered by AI-driven automation and intelligence.

StoreHippo B2B marketplace platform is designed on the mobile-first principle and comes with an in-built mobile apps builder, enhanced with native AI capabilities. You can seamlessly create multiple mobile apps for different users, while AI helps personalise buyer journeys, automate workflows, and optimise operations. Brands can build Android or iOS mobile apps right from their admin dashboard at zero additional costs and with no coding required. When you build a B2B multi vendor marketplace with StoreHippo, you also create PWA stores that look, feel, and work like mobile apps even on entry-level devices.

Ready to give your wholesale business the power and edge of B2B apps? Get a custom walkthrough to implement it, book your free demo now.

FAQs

1. Why do wholesale marketplaces need multiple B2B apps instead of a single marketplace app?

At scale, a single app cannot effectively serve buyers, vendors, delivery teams, and internal admins without creating operational friction. Each stakeholder group has distinct workflows, permissions, and decision contexts.

Enterprise-grade B2B marketplaces require role-specific apps to ensure speed, clarity, and accountability across operations.
With StoreHippo’s B2B marketplace platform, enterprises can build and manage multiple role-based B2B apps, including buyers, vendors, delivery boys, and admins from a single unified backend, ensuring governance without sacrificing agility.

2. How do B2B buyer apps impact conversion rates in wholesale marketplaces?

Buyer apps directly influence discovery speed, reordering frequency, and checkout efficiency. Modern B2B buyers expect mobile-first, self-service experiences with clear pricing, bulk ordering, and fast reorders.

StoreHippo B2B ecommerce platform offers personalised catalogues, RFQs, tiered pricing visibility, and AI-powered recommendations, helping enterprises reduce buying friction and drive higher order values and repeat purchases.

3. Can enterprises run multiple regional or category-specific B2B apps on one platform?

Yes, but only if the platform supports native multi-store and multi-app architecture. Enterprises serving different geographies, industries, or buyer segments cannot rely on one generic storefront.

StoreHippo enables enterprises to create multiple sub-store B2B apps (region-wise, category-wise, or buyer-segment-wise) while managing catalogues, pricing, vendors, and operations centrally. This allows localisation without operational silos.

4. How do admin B2B apps improve operational control in multi vendor marketplaces?

Admin apps centralise decision-making and provide real-time visibility across sellers, orders, inventory, and fulfilment. Without a dedicated admin app, enterprises struggle with delayed approvals, fragmented data, and reactive management.

StoreHippo’s built-in admin B2B app gives enterprises unified control over vendors, pricing, orders, logistics, and analytics, enabling faster decisions and scalable operations.

5. Why is a dedicated vendor B2B app critical for marketplace scalability?

Vendor performance directly impacts buyer experience. Without vendor apps, sellers depend heavily on manual coordination, leading to delays, catalogue errors, and inconsistent fulfilment.

StoreHippo’s vendor B2B apps empower sellers to manage catalogues, pricing, inventory, orders, and fulfilment independently. AI-powered cataloguing and seller assistants further reduce onboarding friction and operational overhead at scale.

6. How do B2B apps help enterprises manage complex pricing and buyer-specific terms?

Wholesale marketplaces operate with negotiated pricing, buyer-specific discounts, MOQs, credit limits, and contract-based terms. Managing these manually across channels often leads to pricing errors, approval delays, and inconsistent buyer experiences.

StoreHippo’s B2B apps enable enterprises to configure and manage complex pricing rules centrally, including login based pricing, tiered pricing, volume-based discounts, RFQs, and approval workflows. These rules are applied consistently across buyer apps, vendor interfaces, and admin dashboards, ensuring accuracy, transparency, and faster order closures without manual intervention.

7. What role does AI play in strengthening B2B apps beyond basic mobility?

AI transforms B2B apps from transactional tools into intelligent growth enablers. It enables intent-based discovery, personalised recommendations, automated cataloguing, and assisted buying journeys.

StoreHippo’s AI-powered ecommerce platform embeds intelligence across all B2B apps, buyers, sellers, and internal teams, ensuring faster decisions, higher conversions, and operational efficiency without manual intervention.

8. How do enterprises ensure consistency across multiple B2B apps?

Consistency depends on a unified architecture, not integrations. When apps are built on disconnected systems, pricing, inventory, and workflows fall out of sync.

StoreHippo’s unified, AI-native platform ensures that all B2B apps operate on a shared intelligence layer, maintaining consistency across catalogues, pricing, orders, and fulfilment while scaling seamlessly.

9. Is it better to build custom B2B apps or use a platform with built-in app builders?

Custom-built apps increase development cost, time-to-market, and long-term maintenance complexity, especially as marketplace requirements evolve.

StoreHippo’s built-in mobile app builder allows enterprises to create Android, iOS, and PWA B2B apps for all stakeholders directly from the admin dashboard, without coding or additional development overhead.

10. How do B2B apps support long-term growth for wholesale marketplaces?

B2B apps are no longer optional add-ons, they are core infrastructure. They drive faster reorders, reduce sales dependency, improve vendor productivity, and enable scalable fulfilment.

With StoreHippo’s B2B marketplace platform, enterprises can build AI-ready, mobile-first B2B apps that evolve with buyer expectations, seller growth, and operational complexity, turning apps into a long-term competitive advantage.