Digital B2B Marketplaces Are Cutting Out Middlemen While Reshaping Procurement

There’s a sea of change sweeping through the B2B landscape.

Traditional models of enterprise buying and selling are being displaced by digital marketplaces that aim to streamline workflows, reduce costs and deliver consumer-grade experiences to business buyers.

After all, as of Tuesday (Dec. 10), you can now buy a car on Amazon. B2B procurement professionals are increasingly discovering that B2B marketplaces are among the fastest-growing B2B digital sales channels, offering specialized commercial products across even more traditional industries such as automotive, health care, agriculture, metals, chemicals, heavy manufacturing and aerospace.

The acceleration isn’t just about moving sales online, it’s about fundamentally reimagining how businesses interact with their entire ecosystem of partners and customers.

The traditional B2B buying journey typically involves multiple disconnected systems: procurement platforms, supplier portals, logistics tracking tools and payment processing solutions. This fragmentation creates friction at every step, from product discovery to order fulfillment.

Modern B2B marketplaces help eliminate these pain points by serving as a unified hub that mitigates the need to switch between systems while simultaneously streamlining manual and complicated workflows with digital advances that include artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics. And at the center of every B2B marketplace sits a streamlined and optimized B2B payment experience.

Read more: B2B Marketplaces Unlock New Opportunities for Commercial Procurement

Here’s What B2B Firms Can Now Buy Online

PYMNTS has been tracking the rise of digital B2B marketplaces across various industries, even including the U.S. government.

Within the agribusiness sector, AgVend, a B2B marketplace for agricultural products, claims to have captured more than 25% of North America’s agriculture input retail market. In September, AgVend joined forces with Bayer’s seed and agribusiness division to further develop FieldView, Bayer’s digital farming platform.

Over the summer, AgVend launched an AI copilot, Goose, for its platform. Per a release, an agronomist can ask Goose, “Who are my largest urea buyers from the past three years that haven’t booked this fall?” Or a merchandiser can prompt it to “Draft a text message for grain prospects updating them on the recent market changes.”

Digital B2B marketplaces are also taking flight in the aerospace sector. Last month, United Cargo, the cargo arm of United Airlines, joined the cargo.one digital B2B marketplace for booking and marketing air freight capacity. Boeing Global Services, a division of Boeing that includes a B2B eCommerce marketplace for parts and repairs, generates billions in revenue.

There’s even a B2B marketplace, Xometry, for on-demand manufacturing services like 3D printing, CNC machining and injection molding, which also provides instant quoting and AI-powered supplier matching.

Read more: Cross-Border eCommerce Is Reshaping B2B Procurement

Breaking Down Longstanding B2B Procurement Silos

The story behind the rise of B2B marketplaces as a preferred sales channel is tied both to payments innovations and the ability for B2B customers to now manage their entire procurement lifecycle in one place.

“The fewer salespeople you need to talk to, the more efficient the system becomes for everyone,” Shep Hickey, CEO at metal digital marketplace Bryzos, told PYMNTS. In fact, Hickey’s ideal is an invoice-to-match procurement process that is “gone in 60 seconds.”

Echoing that sentiment, Dave Haase, president at ChemDirect, told PYMNTS in a conversation posted last November: “Many folks don’t want to buy from 30 or 40 different vendors. They want to be able to consolidate that with a few vendors, as few as possible … To differentiate ourselves, we have to make it truly seamless to buy, and to have a pricing structure that is completely transparent.”

Today’s B2B buyers, shaped by their experiences with consumer platforms like Amazon, demand similar levels of convenience and functionality in their professional purchases. Leading B2B marketplaces are rising to meet these expectations.

Ultimately, the real power of B2B marketplaces could lie in their network effects. Each new participant — whether buyer, seller or service provider — increases the platform’s value for all other users. This creates a virtuous cycle that can help in accelerating adoption.

As B2B marketplaces mature, they’re pushing into new territory by embedding financial services directly to the transaction flow, such as payment processing, credit lines and insurance products. On the buyer-side, AI-powered tools can help optimize inventory levels and anticipate maintenance needs.

Despite their rapid growth, B2B marketplaces still face challenges. Data standardization, integration with legacy systems and change management within organizations remain ongoing hurdles.

As Sovos Chief Technology Officer Eric Lefebvre told PYMNTS, “[The] next horizon over the next five years is truly in B2B and driving those changes … this is the calm before the storm … The next five to six years [are] going to be a massive change agenda for large manufacturers distributors that are operating in multiple countries … The payment methods, the compliance environment, ERP, the level of sophistication around automation — and that’s where payments modernization will have an impact.”