How to Build a B2B Food Marketplace | Apiko

How to build a B2B food marketplace?

Driving digital opportunities in the post pandemic environment.

Why build a B2B food marketplace?

T

he B2B e-commerce market is growing fast. According to ResearchAndMarkets, the global B2B e-commerce market is estimated to reach $20.9 trillion by 2027. It can be a great opportunity to consider your own marketplace development. By upgrading your enterprise with a custom buying and selling platform, you can:

Facilitate the cooperation and streamline the business process of both suppliers and buyers

Connect the important players of the food industry in one place

Boost sales by making buying and selling on your platform easy and efficient for businesses of all sizes

State of B2B e-commerce in the Covid-19 pandemic: The e-commerce industry has been greatly affected by Covid-19 recently. Amidst global lockdown and continuous restrictions, customers have switched from traditional brick-and-mortar stores to online shopping.

Business-to-business communications are becoming digital too.

According to the e-commerce industry experts, digitalization of business operations has actually had a positive impact and many companies have witnessed a great increase in sales. Development of B2B marketplaces allows businesses to get ahead of competition, especially in such sectors as wholesale distribution and manufacturing, where slow adoption of new digital strategies prevails.

Why are B2B marketplaces so popular?

B2B platforms play a central role in the worldwide economy. They: Facilitate the establishment of new trading relationships between companies

Maintain the existing trading relationships

Allow businesses to lower their marketing expenses

Reach remote areas; help businesses scale and become globally competitive

Boost sale rates and help companies as well as customers manage their supply chains The increase of mobile and internet usage is creating even better opportunities for B2B industry growth. Due to the ease of online transactions, the possibility for companies to view the orders/payments, and track the products even on their mobile devices, the adoption of B2B e-commerce marketplaces has soared.

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Custom B2B marketplace development: Take your food business to a new level

1. Adopt digital transformation for your business There is a strong competition. The players are trying harder than ever to innovate their business models in order to provide better online user experience for both buyers and suppliers.

To transform your company digitally, you need a strong strategy that amplifies your business’s strengths.

Whether you build a CRM, e-commerce platform, or a marketplace, the main point is to greatly improve the way your business operates, automate different tasks and processes, improve productivity, collect and organize loads of data, and achieve greater efficiency.

The food industry especially has experienced a growing demand for digitalization. From restaurant orders and buying groceries to supplying foodservice with the ingredients, all has the potential and growing need to go online. The market is gigantic and includes niche businesses as well as global market leaders. Only restaurants in the US earn about $800 billion in annual sales. Connecting suppliers with retailers is a must.

Isn’t it a great opportunity to grasp?

How does the B2B food platform work?

The platform hosts distributors/suppliers and customers (different food businesses). Vendors place the catalog of their products, with the availability tag, prices and inventory. That makes it easy for food businesses to search for the products they need and order the products online. The order can be delivered even to the storefront, depending on the supply chain management.

2. Plan the digital experience How are you going to provide value for your company, employees, or users?

When you have analyzed the market and created a vision, focus on how you can meet your customers needs. Consider their involvement with your company, possible ways of interaction, and new, optimized ways they engage in business processes.

Planning your B2B food marketplace development directly involves thinking about all the necessary features for smooth and efficient user flow. The basic functionalities of a two-sided marketplace include:

For sellers:

For buyers:

Creating a storefront

Placing items for sale

Product management features (edit prices, description, availability)

Communication with buyers

Order processing

Payment and preferred delivery

Advanced search process with

faceted filters

Communication with sellers

Easy check-out

Choose the preferable delivery

and payment options

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Custom B2B marketplace development: Take your food business to a new level

What else can you add to your B2B food marketplace?

API integrations

Push notifications

Reviews

You can connect any additional tools to your marketplace, such as chat, video, audio APIs to save time and money on custom solutions.

Make your marketplace a part of users’ daily lives. Alert your users about new orders, text messages, some changes or updates.

Foster trust between users with a rating or review system. Most customers make decisions to buy after positive feedback about the vendor and the products.

Up-to-date information about the inventory

Management

of the warehouses

Shipping

management

Help vendors track the current stock level and list products accordingly. Both buyers and sellers will win from this feature

You can also implement a warehouse management system for more accurate inventory tracking on different stock locations. Plus, buyers have the option of picking orders from the warehouse closest to them.

Providing delivery options minimizes the cart abandonment rate. Attract more customers and increase sales with favourable shipping options and rates.

Separate vendor stores

Discounts

Minimum order quantity

Allow vendors to create their personal stores with unique URLs inside your marketplace.

This will allow them to manage their products more easily and attract new customers to the B2B platform.

Wholesalers often provide discounts on certain products bought in higher quantities to sell more and build customer loyalty. Make that possible on your platform too.

For suppliers and distributors it is important to maintain margins. Minimum order quantity promotes bulk purchasing and increases profits.

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Custom B2B marketplace development: Take your food business to a new level

F

or your marketplace to be a profitable business venture, it’s essential to think about its business model beforehand. Here are some of the most popular options:

Commission This business model allows you to charge a commission for each transaction that takes place between two sides of your B2B marketplace. The percentage you set can attract or push back the potential users. However it remains the most popular business model in different industries.

Subscription The B2B food marketplace can have subscription plans with different duration. You can choose how often you want to charge users: weekly, monthly, annually. It suits best the needs of suppliers/distributors and food businesses with high sales volume.

Also the premium version with a trial period and limited free plan works well as a marketing tool. It can be the priciest but can give unlimited access to all the features available on the platform.

Advertising With the advertising business model, third parties can promote their products and services for a certain fee.

There are the following advertising models available: Cost per impression (CPI)

Cost per click or pay per click (CPC/PPC)

Cost per period (daily, weekly, monthly)

Featured listings By allowing featured listings on your platform, sellers need to pay a certain fee to have their products featured at the top of the list, where more buyers will see them.

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Custom B2B marketplace development: Take your food business to a new level

3. Turn to professionals to bring digital transformation to your enterprise There are a number of things you must take into account during the B2B marketplace development process.

After doing research, analyzing, and validating the idea, create a list of all the requirements and necessary features.

Turn to the development team of your custom B2B food marketplace. They will provide you with a detailed estimate of your requirements.

The next phase is wireframes and UI/UX design creation. That allows you to clearly see what your product will look like and how clients will use it.

You can develop a minimum viable product (MVP) that will include the fundamental features needed for the proper functioning of your marketplace. Expanding is never a problem when you have a good base.

Choose experts in their field to help you digitally transform your business processes or the development of a high-quality B2B food marketplace, you’ll basically need:

F

Project manager

Team of developers (front-end, back-end)

UI/UX designer

Quality Assurance engineer A

ccording to your business needs, the complexity of the project, and its duration, you may opt for: In-house team.

+ A team of developers who will work at your company, know all its inner workings and fulfill every requirement you may come up with.

- Hiring someone full-time means salaries, taxes, equipment. Plus you’ll need a whole team including UI/UX designer, QA engineer to meet all your development needs. reelance app developers.

+ Freelancers can be found on Upwork. The benefits are cheaper costs, part-time employment, and flexible cooperation.

- You’ll also need to find and hire many people as a part of the team for the marketplace to function well. All the management and monitoring of the process lies with you.

F

oftware company.

+ Software agency provides a team of professionals in different areas needed for fully-fledged product development. If you choose to outsource the development, e.g. to Eastern Europe, it will be much cheaper than hiring an agency in the US, though of the same quality.

S

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Custom B2B marketplace development: Take your food business to a new level

The success of your project depends on the project managers’ expertise and

professionalism. So just make sure they meet certain standards before signing the contract: Nice and clear communication

Transparent workflow

Open to queries and respond fast

Checklist: What should you consider when selecting your future development partner?

Range of services

Technology stack and tools

Portfolio and case studies

Expertise level

Ratings and clients’ feedback

References

Existing apps or websites

Costs and time frames

Software development lifecycle

NDA agreement provision

Project management tools and workflow

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Apiko Case Study: Halalfood

Food marketplace for businesses that provide food, permissible in traditional Islamic law.

Story

Challenge

The main idea of the project consisted in creating a reliable network of the restaurants, cafes, supermarkets and other public caterings that have a "halal food" status.

The client came to us with the request to improve the overall state of the marketplace, reorganize the database structure, and optimize the architecture.

Our tasks were: Change project architecture

Merge two servers with similar functionality to a single one (Web+mobile server)

Make the backend functionality reusable for web platform and mobile client

Make refactoring of the implemented solutions

Extend the platform with new features

Starting Point To commence the project, we have been provided with the following data: Source code for web & mobile to refactor

The list of required features to add

General business vision and statements

Research & Analysis During the discovery stage we took these measures: We carefully analyzed the input data and discussed the scope of work with a customer Our tech experts evaluated numerous technologies and defined the most suitable tools for the product

During the development process, we achieved the following outcome: Source code refactoring, architecture optimization

Adding necessary functions for web & mobile

Rough and detailed project estimates

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Functionality

We helped to deliver the following features in HalalFoodHunt: For restaurants List their business

Choose a subscription plan

Submit documents for verification

Select and offer discounts for the visitors

Put up a QR display at the store or website, so the visitors can use this discount

For customers Search merchants by categories, preferences, discount, location, menu, price, etc.

Sort listings by your location

View merchants on the map

View merchants and add them to your favorite lists

Scan QR code to verify merchants and get a discount

Result The Apiko team developed a scalable online food marketplace, optimized its architecture, and improved the overall project's performance.

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Contacts Discuss Your Idea with Apiko Team Still have questions?

Let’s talk about your project!

Here are three available options for you to proceed further:

Book a call for direct conversation with our tech experts Submit a contact form so we could get back to you via email Estimate your project with our Project Cost Calculator

Anastasiia Mykoliuk

Iryna Chaika

Denis Sikorsky

Michael Rokosh

Partner Manager a.mykoliuk@apiko.com

Partner Manager i.chaika@apiko.com

Digital Business Consultant d.sikorsky@apiko.com

Digital Business Consultant mike@apiko.com

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