Best E-commerce Practices and Platforms to Sell Apparel on B2B Marketplaces

B2B marketplaces have powered thousands of businesses worldwide in delivering customized marketplace solutions as per requirements. Core competency of businesses is to jump into the market, finding the right quality of product and selling it. Developing a solution from scratch may take an insurmountable effort and can easily fail when it isn’t your core business functionalities. Instead, a prepackaged white label solution of getting associated with B2B marketplaces allows you to focus on core business competencies, keeping marketing tactics at a back seat. B2B marketplaces offer brand presence, marketing, growth opportunities and a bigger platform to commence business. These marketplaces have a solid foundation for the trading of businesses with an indestructible digital infrastructure. The reasons that make multi seller an ideal business model are:

• Availability of turnkey solutions that make it easy to launch the business
• Lot of inspirational entrepreneurial examples to help you frame your business model
• The willingness of vendors and sellers to trade online
• Easy to scale to new markets or product lines by adding new vendors
• Multiple ways to generate revenue along with commissions on orders
• Customers willingness and trust in marketplace brands

Top 5 B2B Multi Vendor Marketplaces in India

1. Udaan

Udaan was conjured up and developed to small and medium businesses to run and flourish in their business. Udaan offers a direct connection of buyers with manufacturers and helps them to buy and sell their product and services on a common platform. Udaan has 1,50,000+ traders, wholesalers and retailers from various divisions of India. One of the satisfactory features of this multi-vendor platform is that it provides credit facility to selected buyers on the platform. 

2. IndiaMART

IndiaMART is popularized as a successful B2B multi vendor marketplace in India. It permits large scale businesses, SMEs and individual sellers growth opportunities on a wider platform. Through its 47 lakh+ suppliers, IndiaMART trades over 5 Cr products listed on its platform to over 47 Lakh enterprises and individual buyers across India.

3. Alibaba

Alibaba not only connects Indian suppliers and businesses domestically but also offers a huge platform for exporters, importers and suppliers at a global level. Indian buyers can buy products from global sellers and also sell their products globally through Alibaba’s B2B multi vendor marketplace. Its active buyers list is over 30 million and million other sellers too. This makes Alibaba one of the leading multi-vendor marketplaces. 

4. TradeIndia

Tradeindia has over 5 million registered users and approximately 4 million sellers and buyers. It connects small businesses from Indian as well as international markets who can sell their products and services through this common platform. It has been bestowed with many accolades for offering reliable and industry best services to its merchants and other businesses in India as well as in global markets. 

5. ExportersIndia

ExportsIndia is an exclusive ecommerce marketplace to help Indian manufacturers and sellers go further and beyond to the foreign markets while also successfully selling in the domestic markets. It has helped many businesses reach unbelievable pedestal through online selling. 

B2B E-commerce Practices to Adapt for Selling Apparel

• Tax Management: If your eCommerce marketplace is catering to the global audience or multi regions, then one of the best practices to follow is to figure out taxes to different states according to their tax rules and then assign products to the tax bracket. Fetch real-time tax rates based on categories imported and assigned to products. 
• Invoicing Module: Having a set invoicing provides transparency to the customers about the order they have placed. Invoicing modules are especially important for b2b eCommerce marketplaces. New seller tax invoice module should have an invoice number, tax categories and mandatory government information related to a particular state or country.    
• Reliable Payment Gateways: For an online marketplace owner, managing the payment process manually such as withdrawal requests, seller payouts, & refunds is a time & effort consuming task especially if you are operating globally. So choose world-ready payment gateways like paypal for easy transactions throughout the world.

• Location services: Personalization has become the first priority for traders now, entrepreneurs have been struggling to provide personalization with the features integrated features like manageable Geo-Location setting that sets the product listing & search on the platform based on the delivery address or pick up location. It should also have a “Not available for your location” feature for products that are not available for a particular location. Add to cart functionality will not be available for products that are not available at a location.

• Payment gateway options: It should securely interface between an eCommerce website and a global trader’s preferred mode of payment, which can be their bank account, credit card, debit card, gift card, or any online wallets. With multiple payment gateway options preferred worldwide, customer purchasing experience becomes more relevant and nice. 

• Shipping Management: One of the most difficult management routines a B2B platform should follow is to manage the huge logistics, fetch live rates from shipping carriers configured, create shipping labels & generate tracking numbers for orders from shipping carriers configured, create shipping orders from shipping carriers configured post-order process, track orders and follow a strict post-order process.  

• Engaging Checkout Experience: The checkout process has to be seamless to reduce the number of abandoned carts. The checkout must be optimized according to the user’s journey to minimize the abandoned cart rate. All the details of pick up and ship, taxes, location services and payment options should be on display while checking out