EBay Inc. this summer is rolling out a tool called a Seller Hub to give businesses on eBay.com access to data that can help them sell more effectively. “They can take a look at guidance on how they are pricing and monitoring accurately,” says Pooja Piyaratna, divisional merchandise manager of the Business & Industrial category on eBay.com “That’s something that we offer that is available for our sellers and gives the sellers the ability to extract information and manage.”

EBay does some $4 billion per year in B2B gross merchandise sales and currently has more than 7 million B2B-oriented SKUs on its marketplace, eBay says. The company, which reported total combined B2B and retail gross merchandise sales last year of $81.67 billion, says 25 million businesses and individuals worldwide sell on eBay sites, though it does not break out the number that focus on sales to businesses. “We have a trusted experience, so not only are we really taking care of the buyers but also the sellers that are on our platform,” Piyaratna says.

“We don’t compete with our sellers,” she says. “They know they are on a platform that is a fair marketplace and they can compete and conduct their business in a way that they can feel confident that they are being taken care of and that they aren’t in competition with the platform that they are on.”

Piyaratna notes that sellers have a dedicated account management team to help support them as they conduct their business on eBay. “There are quite a few benefits, not to mention the global reach that the eBay platform offers where we sell in over 100 different countries.”

When eBay executives point out that eBay doesn’t compete with third-party sellers on its marketplace, and they make that point frequently, they are referring to other companies—namely Amazon.com Inc.—that do. But Amazon is also expanding services to help businesses sell on its marketplace.

advertisement

Colin Puckett, senior marketing manager for Amazon Business, which reports more than $1 billion in B2B sales and a month-to-month growth rate of 20%, says it introduced features for buyers and sellers to help make the B2B marketplace more widely used, in effect helping B2B commerce catch up to the popularity of retail commerce on Amazon.com as well as other consumer marketplaces. Amazon has been building features for both buyers and sellers that are customized for the uniqueness and complexities of business-to-business transactions, he says.

“For example, businesses tend to buy in larger quantities and want more visibility into those spending habits,” he says. “For buyers, we have built improved purchasing reporting and spend reconciliation tools to provide that visibility. For sellers, we have enabled a tiered quantity discount pricing feature as well as a tiered fee structure to incentivize larger purchases from businesses.”

At IRCE 2016 in Chicago earlier this month, Amazon Business vice president Prentis Wilson discussed during the B2B Workshop that, among other things, Amazon helps business buyers choose the best deal among contracted pricing and open marketplace pricing.

Amazon Business offers a number of tools and programs to help sellers get started, Puckett adds. “We realize that B2B companies bring a broad spectrum of e-commerce experience with them when they arrive on our pages, so our team is prepared to offer guidance to get sellers’ items posted and selling quickly and efficiently.”

advertisement

Phil Burgert is a Pittsburg, Kan.-based freelance writer. Sign up for a free subscription to B2BecNews, a twice-weekly newsletter that covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B e-commerce industry. B2BecNews is published by Vertical Web— Media LLC, which also publishes the monthly business magazine Internet Retailer.

Follow us on LinkedIn and be the first to know when new B2BecNews content is published.

Phil Burgert is a Pittsburg, Kan.-based freelance writer.

Favorite

advertisement