What Is a Multi-vendor Marketplace?

At Convictional, our vision is to build the Operating System for B2B Trade.

Normally, when people think of trade, they think of tariffs, imports and exports, and shipping containers stacked atop cargo ships.

Those are relevant examples of what trade entails. But fundamentally, trade is about the exchange of value between buyers and sellers. The exchange of value is the prerequisite to the activities that we commonly associated with trade (like taxation on imports, freight, and logistics) — that’s the key to making B2B commerce work properly.

One way to facilitate the exchange of value in a B2B relationship is through the integration between the buyers and sellers.

At Convictional, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make B2B trade better. One way to do that is to automate supplier onboarding, the sharing of transactional information, and catalogue management.

These concepts are particularly important for wholesale and dropship relationships where either party could be dealing with hundreds of partners and the associated overhead of those relationships.

In this post, we’ll focus on a single application of Convictional and what you can do with our technology platform and services — building a B2C marketplace platform that integrates with multiple brands and enables faster growth through modern technology.

Convictional is a B2B commerce platform. Now, retailers can use Convictional to create their own multi-vendor marketplaces that serve consumers and their vendors behind the scenes.

A multi-vendor marketplace has two components.

On the front-end, it’s a digital storefront with curated products from third-party vendors.

This is the B2C component. Amazon is the quintessential example of multi-vendor marketplace at scale. While Amazon has first-party products that it is responsible for supplying, most of its catalogue is comprised of products from third-party brands who are looking for distribution.

On the back-end, a multi-vendor marketplace is an integration platform that unifies the vendors and the seller (usually an online retailer).

There is usually a warehouse of product, order, and inventory information that sits between the parties and disperses the information to the appropriate party at the correct time. This can be automated with technology or you can hire a team of people to coordinate the ongoing exchange of this data.

For example, when a new vendor is onboarded, the platform should sync products and the available inventory to the retailer’s marketplace and make them ready for curation. Likewise, when the retailer receives an order, the line items of the order should get sent back to the appropriate vendor(s) so they can fulfil the order.

A multi-vendor marketplace is more than a B2C storefront — it’s a network that combines the elements of curation, integration, and automation together to enable commerce on both sides.

With Convictional, retailers, publishers, and distributors can unify all of their vendors and their catalogues in a single platform.

Curious to learn how? Get in touch with our team to see a demo.