Online business-to-business marketplaces keep popping up and growing like sudden rushes of spring and summer flowers. In a report on marketplaces B2BecNews is soon publishing, we’ll list at least 60—up from fewer than 50 in last year’s report.

They range from behemoths of general business and industrial products eBay.com (in its Business & Industrial section) and Amazon Business, to specialty apparel portals BambooRose and Poshmark.com, heavy equipment market TradeMachines.com, pharmaceuticals portal rxTrade.com and surplus goods site SurplusRecord.com.

Among the things they all share: Buyers and sellers need to take the right steps to get the most out of them.

Buyers, for example, can work with the marketplaces to ensure that suppliers are providing accurate product descriptions. That can save procurement teams time and headaches from buying the wrong things. And sellers should work with the portals on presenting the most attractive as well as accurate product images and descriptions. That can make a big difference in how a seller stands out as a reliable supplier.

And here’s a tip for companies that sell through e-marketplaces as a supplement to their own e-commerce sites from Jeff McRitchie, vice president of marketing for binding and laminating dealer MyBinding.com: Don’t run the exactly same product descriptions on marketplaces that appear on your own site. When McRitchie ran the same product content on a marketplace site and MyBinding.com, the marketplace wound up outranking his own site in Google search ranking.

“That’s a really painful lesson, because it is often difficult to undo after you’ve done it,” he says in our forthcoming report. “Have something written for the marketplaces separate from what you have on your site.”

Stay tuned to more on e-marketplace strategies.

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