B2B e-commerce is buying and selling between businesses online. B2B stands for business-to-business. Much of all commerce is B2B: a distributor selling electronic parts to engineers, a manufacturer selling to wholesalers, a wholesaler selling to shops, and a supplier selling gloves to hospitals. B2B has moved online more slowly than shopping, for three reasons. Orders are large. Prices are negotiated separately with each customer. And the catalogues can run to millions of items.
Think back to a final-year engineering project. A student needs 20 resistors, a microcontroller and a temperature sensor, and must find the exact part numbers among lakhs of similar parts. An electronic components distributor sells such parts online, in small quantities, with search by specification.
The product data in every catalogue comes from manufacturers. A maker of switches, pipes or sensors must send the description, the photos and the specifications of every product to every distributor and retailer. Product information management (PIM) software keeps this data correct in one place and sends it on.
Here is a typical case of a business order. The owner of a medical shop in Guwahati restocks every week from a pharmaceutical wholesaler. She used to phone her order to the wholesaler's office. Now she logs in to the wholesaler's B2B ordering portal. It shows her own negotiated prices, her credit limit and a reorder list of what she bought last time. She changes a few quantities and places the order. The wholesaler's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system receives it, and creates the invoice with GST.
India's neighbourhood kirana stores are mostly served in a different way. Consumer-goods companies, known in India as FMCG companies (fast-moving consumer goods), send sales representatives to lakhs of shops. The representative takes each order on a phone. A distributor management system (DMS) passes it to the local distributor, who delivers the goods.
Before any of this, a business must find its suppliers. A B2B marketplace lists suppliers and their products, so that a buyer can compare them and ask for prices. It follows the marketplace model: the marketplace never owns the goods.
Some industries go one step further and share one network. Through an industry supply exchange, hundreds of hospitals and their suppliers exchange catalogues, contracts, orders and invoices in standard formats.
The next change is in search. AI models now read manufacturers' datasheets and match a buyer's plain description to the right part. This kind of search uses vector embeddings, lists of numbers that place texts with similar meanings close together.