A business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce portal gained a new wave of suppliers, as Omnia Partners announced 10 new participants for its Opus platform for procurement.
Omnia, which operates nationally as a cooperative purchasing organization, has expanded Opus to include more than 8 million SKUs, according to the company. The new suppliers include IT solutions provider SHI, infrastructure solutions distributor Graybar and laboratory equipment supplier Fisher Scientific, among others.
Omnia claims that its Opus platform now provides a portal for nearly 40,000 public-sector procurement professionals. Those buyers come from school districts, as well as municipal agencies. As they do, they shop across 650-plus suppliers in a single online cart, using pre-negotiated, competitively bid contracts that satisfy public compliance requirements.
New suppliers joining Omnia’s Opus portal
The latest Opus additions for Omnia signal accelerating movement into B2B procurement. Government and nonprofit buyers make this shift possible as they move away from manual, supplier-by-supplier purchasing toward marketplace-style buying.
Todd Abner, president and CEO at Omnia, said people expect purchasing to be fast, intuitive and seamless.
“We’re bringing that same level of simplicity to public procurement,” Abner stated in a release announcing the initiative.
One of the portal’s users contributed positive feedback as well.
“Opus has had a huge impact on making sure that we know we’re in compliance,” said Mandy Hall, procurement accountant at Northwest Shoals Community College. “It’s been one of the best decisions that we decided to take as a college in procurement.”
In addition to Fisher Scientific, Graybar and SHI, Opus also welcomed:
- Janitorial supplies distributor BradyPLUS
- Vehicle and fleet services provider E-Z-GO/Cushman
- IT provider Insight Public Sector
- Food-service equipment supplier Johnson-Lancaster & Associates
- Furniture manufacturer Mediatechnologies
- Educational suppliers distributor School Specialty
- Workplace furnishing seller Vari
Omnia’s marketplace approach with Opus
Mike Danford, chief strategy officer at Adverio, a B2B ecommerce agency, said the buyer relationship is worth more than the product catalog. He sees marketplaces figuring that out.
“Reducing friction for the buyer is where the money is at,” Danford stated. “Buyers want one login, one cart, one trusted brand — A.K.A.: The marketplace that they can trust to manage every purchase order.”
In Danford’s view, this type of online portal is “the modern-day Sears.” However, he said online options mean “buyers never have to leave their seat or their preferred one-stop shop.”
The procurement relationship, Danford added, is with the platform at both ends of the demand and supply chains. That means that buyers want one place to comparison shop. Thus, once a marketplace owns that habit, it’s no longer optional for brands to adopt it, too.
“We see it in our own numbers on the consumer side,” he stated. “Amazon has been incentivizing B2B for years with business pricing, and for certain brands we operate, B2B accounts for close to 20% of total purchases in some categories.”
The future for B2B marketplaces
Danford assessed that platforms like Opus are likely to begin adding new sponsorships. In addition, he expects to see more media placements and ads, giving sellers with marketing dollars new options to buy their way up the search results pages.
“It’s a moneymaker, and it works. Amazon proved it,” he said. “The distributors who get ahead of it — clean product data, strong content, budget ready for sponsored placement — will win the shelf the same way the smart consumer brands did.”
Meanwhile, Hilary Smith, chief marketing officer at Linnworks, a multichannel ecommerce operations platform, offered a data-driven view on where consolidation is headed.
“Our research shows multichannel is now the operating default, not the exception, with the average retailer selling across 4.15 (UK) and 4.25 (US) marketplaces and channels,” Smith shared. “Businesses have accepted that managing dozens of separate vendor or channel relationships manually doesn’t scale.”
Tradeoffs for online channels
Still, there can be risk in going online-first without the right infrastructure, according to Smith.
“Only 33.2% (UK) and 37.2% (US) of retailers describe their cross-channel inventory visibility as ‘excellent,’” Smith said.
Distributors joining consolidated marketplaces face the same challenge in reverse. They may gain broader reach, but only if their systems can keep pace with real-time inventory and order accuracy.
“Expect the next phase of B2B marketplace consolidation to follow the same arc,” Smith explained, saying future success would be “less about supplier count” and “more about who can guarantee real-time inventory accuracy, integrated fulfillment and reliable data across the platform.”
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