Most products have one main customer. A marketplace has at least two, and they often want opposite things. Buyers want more choice, lower prices and quick answers. Suppliers want serious buyers, fair prices and less time wasted on enquiries that go nowhere.
My early product work at Chemarc was with a B2B platform serving large chemical manufacturers. B2B marketplaces add their own complications on top of the usual two-sided problem. Orders are larger, relationships matter more, and a lot of the real deal still happens outside the platform.
Both sides need a reason to stay
| Side | What they want | What drives them away |
|---|---|---|
| Buyers | Relevant suppliers, accurate information, quick responses | Outdated listings, slow quotes, unreliable suppliers |
| Suppliers | Qualified enquiries, repeat business, fair terms | Low-quality leads, price-only competition, high fees |
A feature that helps one side can hurt the other. Making it easier for buyers to send enquiries to many suppliers at once sounds great for buyers. Suppliers may see it as spam and stop responding.
I'd check every significant feature against both columns before building.
Trust is the product
In B2B, a bad transaction can be expensive. Buyers need to trust that suppliers are real, that product specifications are accurate and that orders will be fulfilled. Suppliers need to trust that buyers are serious and will pay.
That means verification, clear information and some way to handle disputes are often more important than any discovery feature. For specialised products, accurate technical details matter a lot. A wrong specification can be a serious problem for a manufacturer.
Quotes are messy
B2B purchases often don't have a fixed price. Quantity, delivery terms, specifications and timing all affect the quote. The product has to handle back-and-forth negotiation, not just a simple checkout.
Look at how long quotes take and how many get a response at all. Slow or missing responses are one of the fastest ways to lose buyers.
Relationships move offline
Once a buyer and supplier have worked together, they may continue directly, without the platform. This is one of the hardest problems in B2B marketplaces.
You can't prevent it entirely, and trying too hard usually annoys both sides. The better approach is making the platform worth staying on: easier reordering, records of past orders, payment protection, better tools for managing many suppliers.
Listen to your biggest accounts carefully
Large buyers and suppliers will have strong opinions and often a direct line to your team. Their feedback is valuable, but it can also pull the product toward their specific needs. I wrote about handling that in the B2B customer feedback post.
Measure liquidity
Marketplace health is often described as liquidity: how likely it is that a buyer finds what they need and completes a transaction, and that a supplier gets real business.
Useful measures include:
- Share of enquiries that get a response, and how fast.
- Share of quotes that lead to orders.
- Repeat transactions between the same buyer and supplier.
- Active suppliers in each category.
- Buyer searches that return no relevant results.
Look at these by category. A marketplace can be healthy in one product category and empty in another. For repeat transactions, a cohort table by first order month shows whether buyers keep coming back.
Grow one side at a time, carefully
New marketplaces often struggle with the chicken-and-egg problem. Buyers won't come without suppliers, and suppliers won't join without buyers. Usually one side has to be built first, often supply, in a focused category.
That's as much a business model question as a product one. Starting narrow, with a category where you can build real depth, tends to work better than launching broadly with thin coverage everywhere.