B2B marketplaces are a different category, not a harder version of B2C.
We have built procurement platforms, wholesale catalogs, and RFQ engines for founders who know their industry inside out but have never built a platform before.
B2B & Procurement
A B2B marketplace connects businesses as buyers and sellers. That sounds like a straightforward extension of a consumer marketplace. It is not.
B2B buying involves multiple stakeholders, approval flows, contract pricing, payment terms, compliance documentation, and procurement workflows that have nothing to do with how consumers shop. Building the wrong version of this — essentially a B2C marketplace with business accounts — is one of the most common and costly mistakes in this category.
Where most builds run into trouble.
Pricing complexity
A B2B buyer expects contract pricing, volume discounts, and negotiated rates — not a public price that every buyer sees. Your platform needs a pricing architecture that can show different prices to different buyers without that logic becoming unmaintainable.
Account structures
A procurement manager at a mid-sized company is buying for an organization with a budget, approval hierarchy, and sometimes a preferred supplier list. Your platform needs to model organizations, not just users.
Payment terms
Net-30 is the standard expectation in B2B, and Stripe's immediate charge model is not designed for it. We implement net terms using trade credit providers and custom billing logic — this has to be in scope from day one.
How we think about this category.
We do discovery differently on B2B marketplace builds. The first question is always: what is the existing procurement behavior we are replacing? B2B buyers have entrenched workflows — email threads, spreadsheets, and phone calls with account managers. Your marketplace will only win if it is meaningfully better than that, not just digital.
We map the existing workflow before we design the product. Every feature decision follows from that map.
What we typically build on.
Complex B2B marketplace builds almost always require a custom stack. Sharetribe handles the surface-level well but cannot natively support the account hierarchy, contract pricing, and approval workflow logic that B2B requires. We evaluate this in discovery and give you an honest assessment of where off-the-shelf tools end.