B2B marketplaces break the consumer playbook.
Company accounts, approval chains, negotiated pricing and net terms. Almost none of it exists in a standard marketplace platform, and most B2B builds go wrong by discovering that halfway through. We build the parts that make B2B different, first.
Talk to someone who has built one.
Thirty minutes with a senior practitioner. Bring your transaction model, or a rough idea of it, and we will tell you what it implies about scope, cost and platform.
The consumer marketplace pattern does not survive contact with procurement.
Most marketplace software is built around one transaction shape: a person finds a listing, pays a fixed price with a card, and it is done. Nearly every assumption in that sentence fails in B2B.
The price is not on the listing.
B2B buyers expect a quote. Sellers expect to give different prices to different buyers based on volume, contract or relationship. That means an RFQ flow, a negotiation state, and pricing that resolves per buyer rather than per listing. It is the single most common reason a B2B marketplace outgrows a consumer platform in month three.
The buyer is a company, not a person.
Several people from the same organisation need access, with different permissions. Someone raises the request, someone else approves it, a third person receives the invoice. Modelling that properly at the start is straightforward. Retrofitting it once you have live accounts is not.
Money moves later, and differently.
Purchase orders, net 30, invoicing, partial payments against milestones. Card-on-file at checkout covers a small share of real B2B volume, and a platform that only supports it will quietly cap the size of transaction your marketplace can carry.
Four things that decide whether a B2B marketplace works.
Each is available on its own. Together they are what separates a working B2B platform from a consumer marketplace with company logos on it.
Quoting and negotiation
Move from fixed listings to a real request-for-quote flow.
Buyers describe what they need, one or more suppliers respond with a price and terms, and the buyer compares and accepts. Underneath that sit the states most platforms do not have: draft, submitted, quoted, revised, accepted, expired. We build the flow, the notifications that keep it moving, and the audit trail your buyers will eventually be asked for by their own finance team.
- RFQ submission and supplier response flow
- Multi-quote comparison for the buyer
- Revision and counter-offer states
- Quote expiry, reminders and escalation
- Full negotiation history against each transaction
Company accounts, roles and approvals
Model the buying organisation rather than the individual.
One company, several users, different permissions. A requester who can raise an order but not approve it. An approver with a spending threshold. A finance contact who never touches the catalogue but receives every invoice. We map your actual approval chain and build the permission logic to match, including what happens when an approver is away and an order is time-sensitive.
- Company account structure with multiple users
- Role and permission matrix
- Approval thresholds and routing
- Delegation and out-of-office handling
- Company-level order history and reporting
Contract pricing and payment terms
Different prices for different buyers, and money that moves on your buyers' terms.
Volume tiers, negotiated contract rates, customer-specific catalogues, minimum order quantities. On the payment side, purchase orders, net terms, invoicing, deposits and staged payments against delivery. We also model what your take rate does across all of it, because a commission structure that works at $200 rarely works unchanged at $40,000.
- Tiered and contract-specific pricing
- Buyer-specific catalogues and visibility rules
- Purchase order and net terms support
- Invoicing, partial payment and reconciliation
- Take rate modelling across transaction sizes
Supplier onboarding and trust
In B2B, trust is credentials, not star ratings.
A five-star average means very little to a procurement manager. Certifications, insurance, compliance documents, references and verified company details mean a great deal. We build the verification your category actually requires, the expiry tracking that keeps it current, and the supplier onboarding flow that gets a company from interested to transacting without three weeks of email.
- Supplier verification and document management
- Certification and insurance expiry tracking
- Structured supplier profiles for procurement review
- Guided onboarding with progress tracking
- Admin review and approval queue
Eight to twelve weeks, in three phases.
Transaction design
Before anything is built, we map your transaction end to end: who requests, who quotes, who approves, who pays and when. For B2B this phase matters more than in any other category, because the approval chain and the pricing model determine most of the build. You get a written specification you either agree with or change.
Build
Design system, core flows, quoting, company accounts, payments and admin. Weekly demos, so you see the thing working rather than reading status updates. AI handles the repetitive implementation work. Every architectural decision is made by someone who has shipped a marketplace before.
Launch
Soft launch with a controlled group of suppliers and buyers, first real transactions, and the operational tuning that only surfaces with real usage. Sixty days of bug coverage after go-live.
If three of these are true, this is the right starting point.
- You are digitising a market you already know well, often one you have worked in
- Your buyers are companies rather than individuals, with more than one person involved in a purchase
- Prices are negotiated, tiered or contract-based rather than fixed and public
- Payment happens on terms rather than at checkout
- You have relationships with early suppliers, or a credible plan to get them
- You would rather spend three weeks getting the transaction model right than rebuild it in month six
B2B development is the wrong call if any of these is true.
- Your prices are fixed and public and your buyers pay by card. You want a standard marketplace build, which is cheaper. See Build and Launch.
- You have not yet confirmed that suppliers will list at your take rate. Start with pre-development instead.
- Your platform is live and the problem is traction rather than capability. That is a go-to-market conversation.
- You need a procurement system for one company rather than a market for many. The work is real but it is not a marketplace.
- The item comes back and something is wrong with it. See rental marketplace development.
- You are booking a person rather than a product. See service marketplace development.