Top B2B E-Commerce Marketplaces that are winning the B2B Marketing World Cup in 2018
In the last few years, e-commerce has grown tremendously. Today, you can trade with anyone regardless of where they are in the world. The huge range of products and manufacturers available gives you a chance to settle for nothing less than exactly what you need. You can find what you desire on the internet in just a matter of a few clicks.
In the last few years, e-commerce has grown tremendously. Today, you can trade with anyone regardless of where they are in the world. The huge range of products and manufacturers available gives you a chance to settle for nothing less than exactly what you need. You can find what you desire on the internet in just a matter of a few clicks.
With the growth of the e-commerce industry, you can be sure that the competition has also increased. Today we have hundreds of business to business platforms available to us all that say that they are the best. However, very few even make it close on that list.
It seems almost every other day there’s a new B2B portal being created with the newest, most advanced features. While yes, these are quite enticing, you must reconsider before signing up. Although many b2b e-commerce portals offer these exciting features, many of them lack some core ingredients to a successful platform and happy client.
Well, after using business to business platforms for years, I’ve put a list together of who I think is currently winning the race.
Alibaba
With no surprise, Alibaba comes first. It is a Chinese owned platform that was launched in 1999. It is hands down the world’s largest e-commerce platform for business of all sizes around. Alibaba assists a rough figure of more than 18 million buyers and sellers residing in more than 240 countries. It also has more than 40 industry categories!
Alibaba is free to join platform that earns most of its sales from commissions and advertising. Alibaba although Chines, is an English language platform and perfect for cross-border trade of goods. Alibaba’s Market value in a recent poll was at around $140 billion and the value of the IPO at $15 billion.
Alibaba is a B2B platform that connects Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. It is the world’s largest and most valuable retailer, having passed Walmart. It is also one of the largest Internet companies in the world.
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IndiaMart
Next, we have the largest B2B marketplace in India, IndiaMart. IndiaMart has 1.6 million daily visitors and 1.5 million sellers. Compared to Alibaba, this might seem less but it is quite a big number. Especially, when you take into account that it made 20,000 crore sales in 2014.
IndiaMart actually isn’t just a B2B site. It also hosts many B2C clients and businesses as well. Like Alibaba, it provides Basic and Premium membership services through which sellers can create their own homepage, add products online, reply to buying leads, post offers to sell, and source and contact global buyers.
It may seem as though the sellers are only from India because of its name, but IndiaMart allows anyone to buy and sell, around the world.
eWorldTrade
In third place, we have eWorldTrade, quite a popular choice for online B2B trade. Although newer than Alibaba, IndiaMart, and quite a few other business to business platforms, eWorldTrade, easily comes in on the third. And in the next few months, you never know, it may be higher on this list.
The reason for that being, it is the world’s fastest growing business to business portal. It serves more than 220 countries already, which is quite close to Alibaba. eWorldTrade was only founded in 2006, and in the last. eWorldTrade is a US-based platform but its operational units are based all around the world, including, Pakistan, China, and Malaysia.
It has also been actively participating in a variety of conferences and summits, perhaps being the reason of its tremendous growth. The one thing that makes eWorldTrade different and a tough competitor is it’s human to human services. eWorldTrade works very hands on to make sure that its buyers are making full use of the website and greatly assists them in getting their brand to the international and local market. Their edge in the industry is their ability to offer a variety of features along with b2b leads free of cost to all new signups has put them amongst top b2b marketplaces in no time.
Thomasnet
ThomasNet is my next choice for this list. It is the leading online platform for B2B seller discover and product sourcing. ThomasNet has more than 1.8 million buyers visiting its website every month. Like eWorldTrade, on ThomasNet, you can directly request for a quote instead of the general published RFQ.
It used to be called “The Thomas Register of American Manufacturers” and still operates mainly in the USA.
However, if you are an interested buyer, it is definitely worth giving a try. ThomasNet currently has more than 650,000 distributors and manufacturers partnered with it. For people living in the US or Canada, the website can be quite beneficial.
Global Source
Global sources is quite a well-known portal as well. It is a Hong Kong, China based company which again, like Alibaba, mostly facilitates trade from China to the rest of the world. Although the media company was founded in 1970, they launched the industry’s first business to business website in 1996.
Quite an impressive feature of Global Sources is that it connects China to the world using the English language, however, facilitates trade from the world to China using the Chinese language.
Global sources can also be found listed on the NASDAQ exchange with the symbol GSOL. Its revenue at the end of 2012 was $231.7 million which is quite an impressive number.
Today, global sources has more than 1 million international buyers and the services offered are grand as well.
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EC21
Last but definitely not the least, I think EC21 deserves to be talked about. EC21 is a South Korean company which mainly focuses its service to providing opportunities to small and medium-sized businesses. It claims to have more than 1.5 million registered businesses and over 3 million products. It can definitely be regarded as one of the world’s largest B2B marketplaces.
EC21 was founded in 1997, and has since been facilitating global trade opportunities for a huge number of enterprises. Not many may know this, but when EC21 first launched, it was a part of the online trade board of the Korea International Trade Association (KITA). It separated itself only in the 2000. Like eWorldTrade, EC21 also offers online marketing expertise in search engine optimization (SEO), search engine advertisements and social media marketing.
These are the business to business platforms that I think you must give a chance if you’d like to dive in to the world of online trade to grow your business globally.
Now, who’s winning the marketing world cup? Well, Alibaba, IndiaMart and eWorldTrade are the ones I’d bet my money on.
Alibaba is perhaps going to remain at the top for a while, but soon enough, we might see things changing because of how fast other brands, especially eWorldTrade, are growing.