At SouqBox we definitely use both terms because our customers are often interested in starting as an ecommerce site rather than a marketplace. The main difference is that a marketplace allows other sellers into the mix. We built SouqBox to make that seamless. The best way to reach the best range for your potential customers is to allow quality sellers to bring their inventory to your site. You remain in control over who you give seller permissions to so we feel that almost all of our customers will end up as marketplaces, but initially they are seeking a B2B friendly ecommerce site.

Good question. Firstly we built SouqBox to address the needs of B2B customers. Most ecommerce platforms have been built with consumers in mind (B2C). That matters because B2B operations need more complexity to trade online and we think the biggest differences are;

1. Need to negotiate – businesses always negotiate with other on products – if you are a seasoned online consumer you will know that the majority of ecommerce sites are built with a fixed price product – there isn’t anywhere to make an offer and open negotiations.
2. Multi vendor selling – with most ecommerce platforms there is limited multi seller capability if any because this is the beginning of a migration to being a marketplace. We have been building and operating our own markets for nearly 10 years and the learning from what we needed have been designed into SouqBox.
3. SAAS white label – Magento is a great ecommerce framework but its not a white label SaaS platform. Customers still have to configure and build at their own expense.

In your SouqBox dashboard, you can amend the permissions of any user instantly. You can set users as buyers only by default. The users can request access to sell via the platform so youare in control of who gets that right.

All marketplaces have to have rules to manage the small number of users who will try to circumvent the market. Apart from disabling users or changing permissions you can also decide what data is shown in adverts. This prevents rouge sellers encouraging buyers to negotiate off your marketplace and you can adjust these settings at any time.

Obviously you need to be aware of the various data protection laws that might govern what you can do in the territories that you operate. B2B in most countries is more relaxed that consumer data rules however we strongly recommend you get legal advice on that before you start. Your SouqBox market will contain a fully customizable database for your customer and product information. You can show what data to capture, make it compulsory or not and display or not. This can be changed at any time.

Apart from the branding elements, you can tailor the information you want to capture on customers and products. For eg if you have an industry body and want your customers to be members of that, you might ask for their membership number as a compulsory field before they can start. You might also want to tailor the product information to contain data points that your customers would expect. For eg if you are in food you might want to know if the seller is BRC accredited.

SouqBox was built with all of this in mind. Rather than us guess the right questions to ask, we thought it would be best to enable you to decide.

Basically no. Our customers want us to provide the tech capability and often they are the best placed people to educate the market and drive customers to use the site. We do help with automating SEO and will increasingly offer integrated marketing capability but your potential customers know you, not SouqBox.

Yes they can but the data is stored in isolated ‘islands’ so they would need to sign up on other SouqBox hosted sites and the data set may be very different on both. A customer who has signed up on your SouqBox site won’t be automatically able to do so on another SouqBox site. They will need to sign up to the rule of that marketplace and create a new account there. We don’t ‘cross pollinate’ end user data.

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1. Host a link to your souqbox market within your existing estate and it will show in the URL as prod.souqbox.io/ yourmarketname
2. Create what is called a C name record and forward the traffic from that URL to us – you will need to contact technical support and we can guide you in setting that up. Once you point it to our IP address we will do some wizardry on our end and your own web address will appear instead of SouqBox.

If you don’t have a website already you can just use the URL we will designate for you and use this as your main site.

We store all data in the UK & EU cloud infrastructure . Please contact us if you have any specific questions about that.

As for leaving, well apart from the fact that we would hate to see that happen, we would of course help you make that as painless as possible. It’s your data & it can be extracted in CSV format to be reused elsewhere.

Yes. Unlike many ecommerce platforms, we decided at the beginning that tying customers into a contract for a service that they dont get value from, makes no sense. So you can leave us at any time. We promise not to make that awkward and will assist you if that happens. Obviously we would prefer to fix whatever issue you had or requirement you needed if we could but you are free to leave any time (No contract).

Everything we are doing at SouqBox is about helping a transformation in B2B trading to online. We aim to be the best at that in the world and to continuously prove our value to you and hopefully to bring you the cutting edge features you want before anyone else has even thought of that. To make it risk free, there is no upfront money, no contracts. We don’t want to be the reason why you didn’t test your idea out.

Nope. It’s your money so all payments collected on souqbox on your behalf go to your payment gateway provider into your account. SouqBox tells the payment gateway how much to collect and provides the necessary data tags to identify it but the responsibility for card [payment is with the payment providers and they will confirm in the transaction flow if the payment has been successful. You can see your translation number in the trade in your dashboard.

Please note currently we haven’t found a way to settle for you (because it’s in your control) so you will need to reimburse your sellers directly. We are working on that to reduce the admin for you so watch this space!