Wholesale marketplace or branded ordering portal: two tools, two jobs

At a young brand, a concept store’s first order comes in through a wholesale marketplace. The next one, mid-season, arrives as an email to the brand’s agent. The same customer already lives in two tools.

To sell online to their stockists, brands have two main options: join a wholesale marketplace, where buyers browse the catalogues of many brands, or open their own B2B ordering portal. The two serve different goals. Confusing them leads to expecting a tool to do something it was never designed to do.

What is a wholesale marketplace?

A wholesale marketplace is an online platform that brings together many brands and professional wholesale buyers: independent boutiques, concept stores, department stores. Buyers discover brands there, compare them and place orders.

The platform usually handles the matchmaking, and sometimes payment and credit terms. It earns its money through a commission on sales or a subscription.

What is a branded B2B ordering portal?

A B2B ordering portal is an online space in your brand’s image, reserved for your trade customers. Each stockist logs in to browse the collection, see their own prices, track their orders and place reorders.

Your trading rules apply there: minimums, deposits, payment terms, assortments.

Wholesale marketplace or branded portal: a criterion-by-criterion comparison

Wholesale marketplace: an audience, at the cost of some control

The main strength of a marketplace lies in its audience: buyers actively looking for new brands. Some platforms also take on the payment risk.

On the other hand, your brand is shown next to many others, sometimes competitors, and the buyer compares. Commissions eat into your margin, and the platform’s rules override your terms. The relationship with the stockist partly remains the platform’s.

Finally, a marketplace is rarely connected to your trade show order-taking. Your customers and orders then live in two tools, with two order histories to reconcile at the end of the season.

Branded portal: retain and grow every account

An ordering portal extends your sales relationship between appointments. Stockists find their prices, history and terms. They reorder when they need to, without waiting for the next visit from their multi-brand agent. You stay in control of your image, price lists, data and margin.

To get the most out of it, introduce it to every stockist and keep it fed with an up-to-date collection and stock. The guide to in-season replenishment explains how this works.

How to choose between a wholesale marketplace and an ordering portal?

The choice depends on your priority right now:

• Your priority is opening up new markets: trade shows, showrooms and agents are the levers set out in the guide to selling wholesale internationally, and the portal gets each new customer reordering from their very first order.
• Your priority is getting existing customers to reorder and growing replenishment: a branded portal is a better fit.
• You already sell at trade shows and in showrooms: choose a portal that shares the catalogue, customers and rules of your order-taking.
• You use both: make sure marketplace orders feed into the same customer follow-up as all the others.

A single customer record, whatever the channel

Once accounts start ordering again, the portal becomes the working tool: that is where stockists reorder, at your prices and on your terms. A brand that already sells at trade shows should invite its customers onto it as soon as the season ends.

Either way, one rule holds: a single customer record, whatever channel the order came from. McKinsey’s figures on B2B buyers' preferred channels are covered in the article digitising wholesale: how much time do you really save?