Owning Buyer Workflow Captures Spend

Owning the buyer workflow is what turns a marketplace from a lead source into the system that sees almost every dollar of spend. In B2B, suppliers usually keep selling through many channels, so the only realistic path to near full share of wallet is to become the place where the buyer builds carts, places repeat orders, approves purchases, and pays every vendor, including existing off marketplace vendors. That is why demand side procurement software is so powerful.

• The core idea is not just discovery. It is workflow capture. The strongest vertical marketplaces start by replacing phone calls, email, spreadsheets, and rep visits with software that handles sourcing, ordering, logistics, and payment inside one screen. Once buyers run routine purchasing there, the platform can process both marketplace and non marketplace volume.
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• Notch is the concrete example in the interview. Restaurants buy from many distributors, prices can change week to week, and orders involve thousands of SKUs. Software that centralizes ordering and payment becomes the buyer's operating console, which is much stickier than a catalog marketplace that only captures incremental demand.
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• This also explains the contrast with Faire. Faire aggregates broad wholesale supply and has built meaningful scale, but the interview frames vertical categories like food as more operationally complex, with more custom workflows and larger SKU breadth. In those markets, a procurement layer has a better chance to capture everyday purchasing behavior, not just occasional product discovery.
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The next phase is that more vertical marketplaces will move from helping buyers find new vendors to becoming the default place buyers run all purchasing. As they absorb approvals, payments, financing, and reorder workflows, share of wallet rises, take rates become more defensible, and the winner starts to look less like a marketplace and more like the operating system for a category's spend.