By Matthieu Simon

In line with the trends and developments we identified in our previous studies, "The spring of B2B marketplaces" (2017), "B2B marketplaces are blossoming" (2018), and "The summer of B2B marketplaces (2020)", B2B marketplaces have kept growing.

While the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted businesses and customer habits across the globes, the various restrictions and behavioral changes it has entailed have fueled the use of marketplaces across the board. They have played a key role to help businesses weather the storm and provide them the products and services they need to continue their activities during the pandemic.

Although the growth of B2B marketplaces is expected to keep accelerating in the next few years, hurdles remain. Significant strategic, implementation and running issues must be addressed as well for a B2B marketplace to be successfully launched.

Strategic hurdles: defining the right end-customer segment and the relevant products and services, selecting the vendors, harnessing the necessary B2B or B2C experience through the right partners to launch the marketplace and establish a clear implementation roadmap.

Implementation hurdles: developing the capacity to carry out the on-boarding of vendors through a comprehensive screening, selection, insertion, watch, and monitoring process, attracting end-customers, ensuring smooth technical implementation – including a clear, precise and well-sorted e-catalog of products with a reliable search engine – and setting out a progressive extension and standardization of products and services to reduce acquisition costs and churn.

Day-to-day operational hurdles: maintaining adequate pricing, ensuring the reliability of the supply chain and logistics services, providing efficient payment and e-invoicing tools, maintaining client satisfaction, develop new services matching B2C innovations, regarding payment tools for instance, and analyze customer data to improve both product offering and customer experience.