WeMarket is a revolutionary global online B2B marketplace where renowned brands, distributors, wholesalers, retailers and stocklot traders actively trade together for free. Over 40 industries are currently active on WeMarket, including consumer electronics, toys, gaming, apparel, personal care, home decorations, power tools, IT hardware and automotive. WeMarket was founded by the creator of WeTransfer and currently consists of more than 20 skillful and experienced professionals.
WeMarket sought Dun & Bradstreet as a partner to discover innovative ways to ensure that its B2B users were accurately identified—an imperative step to building trust in its online community and fostering ongoing growth.
The Challenge
Without the ability to recognize and verify user identity with reliable data, WeMarket understood building its reputation and ensuring future growth would be tough. WeMarket’s unique B2B marketplace facilitates online trading between businesses. In this environment, it’s important for WeMarket to prevent individual consumers from gaining access to B2B-only pricing and stock from brands or manufacturers online. WeMarket wants reputable, viable businesses to participate in its online trading community, and verifying buyer identity is crucial.
B2B trading is often based on long-term relationships; buyer behavior, payment history and agreement compliance is of utmost importance. A poor seller reputation has negative implications not only for trading partners, but for WeMarket as well. “We want to ensure that individual consumers aren’t joining our marketplace just to find out what the price of products from brands such Nike or Adidas are between a manufacturer and a distributor or a wholesaler and a retailer. They aren’t the prices they pay in the shop and our users don’t want their customers looking over their shoulder.”
How could WeMarket successfully use data to identify reputable B2B buyers to participate in its online trading community and foster positive relationships with each other?
The Solution
In collaboration with D&B, WeMarket can verify companies upon entry. Once a user signs up, the user is instantaneously connected to the D&B Database via Web Services and matched with the company in the global D&B Database. Company verification and immediate credit scoring by Dun & Bradstreet are part of every registration.
On top of that, WeMarket developed a proprietary WeMarket Karma score to constantly measure and show the reputations of their users. An algorithm on the back end of the website automatically “scores” each business user with four pillars: Information (fueled by D&B data), Activity, Impact and Quality. This information helps ensure that each business user conforms to the most stringent reliability standards. WeMarket Karma identifies reliability, business activity and quality of each participant as an added-value indicator of trusted business partnerships and trading with a personal touch.
After registration, WeMarket sends a letter to the user as a final step in verifying the company, which then boosts the user’s Karma Score and helps improve the quality of WeMarket’s algorithm. By going through this process, the user, WeMarket and potential trading partners all benefit from accurate, reliable data. Additionally, WeMarket offers an extra service to users who might desire more information about potential trading partners: ordering D-U-N-S Reports.
Results
WeMarket’s business model necessitates trustworthiness and reliability from its users. Thus, D&B data has offered a high level of security and accuracy within WeMarket’s platform to help attract more users to WeMarket’s services. D&B data is used to verify the identity of each and every user, guaranteeing rigorous reliability checks for 100% of trading partners. Without this standard in place, WeMarket’s heavy investment in infrastructure, its innovative value proposition, its reputation and future market share would be difficult to achieve. Now, each user can enjoy peace of mind that he or she is doing business in a secure, transparent environment—and WeMarket can enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing its community has been verified by Dun & Bradstreet’s clean, accurate business data.