B2B digital export: channels, marketplaces and leads

In short: B2B digital export means selling to foreign businesses through digital channels: a multilingual website that generates enquiries, a login-only B2B ordering portal, B2B marketplaces and electronic order exchange. It works when a manufacturer picks markets and buyers first and tools second, and connects channels, price lists, CRM and logistics.

Key points

According to Politecnico di Milano's Digital Export Observatory, Italian B2B digital exports were worth about €175 billion in 2022, roughly 28% of the country's total exports.
Marketplaces get you found in new markets; your own website and B2B portal protect margin and the relationship with existing customers.
In 2026 Riso Scotti brought in a specialist partner to build its international B2B digital channel, with the stated aim of making it governed and measurable.
VAT, Incoterms and payment terms need settling before the channel opens, not after the first order.
Digital works when it supports importers and distributors: agree territories, price lists and lead handling with your network.
Public support exists to get started, such as SIMEST's e-commerce financing line and ICE's marketplace agreements for Italian companies, but check eligibility and deadlines when you apply.

This matters most for companies already exporting through agents, importers and trade fairs that want a channel that keeps working between meetings. According to Eurostat, in 2024 23.6% of EU enterprises with 10 or more employees sold online and electronic sales made up 19.5% of turnover, 11.1% via EDI and 8.4% via the web. Among companies selling on the web, 45% use a marketplace; in Italy the figure is 65%.

What is B2B digital export and how big is it?

B2B digital export covers sales to foreign business customers where the order or transaction runs through a digital channel. B2C, meaning online exports of consumer goods to consumers (direct or through online retailers), was estimated by the same Observatory at €18.7 billion in 2022, against €175 billion for B2B.

A B2B marketplace is a platform hosting many suppliers that gives professional buyers search, requests for quotation and messaging. Alibaba.com is the best-known example.
A B2B e-commerce portal is an online store reserved for business customers, with login access, customer- or country-specific price lists, minimum orders and agreed payment terms.
EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is the automatic exchange of orders and invoices between supplier and customer business systems, common with large retailers.

For smaller companies the most useful finding is about maturity: most SMEs were at early stages, with the weakest scores on digital sales channels, export technology and KPI dashboards. Many have a presentable website but no system that turns a foreign visit into an order.

What did Riso Scotti do to grow B2B digital exports?

In January 2026 the Italian rice group Riso Scotti announced an agreement with Rosso Fine Food, a company specialising in international trade and digital export channels for food producers. The partner handles international B2B sales development, relationships with importers and distributors, and dedicated digital channels.

Professional buyers, not generic visibility: the initial focus is on specialised foodservice operators and premium retail in fast-growing markets.
Chosen markets: Rosso Fine Food works across Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America, including through platforms such as Alibaba.com.
A measurable channel: the company described the goal as a governed international B2B channel, integrated with its sales strategy and treated as an industrial tool rather than a marketing exercise.

Public sources give no results for the channel, so read the case for its method. The lesson is about governance: someone owns the channel, markets are selected, and digital works with importers and distributors instead of going around them.

Which channel should you pick: multilingual site, B2B portal or marketplace?

It depends on two factors: whether foreign customers already know you, and how standardised your product is. Usually the channels coexist, each with its own job.

Channel	What it does	When it fits	Limits
Multilingual website	Gets you found by buyers searching for suppliers in their language	Technical or custom products, negotiated sales	Localised content and fast replies to enquiries
B2B e-commerce portal	Self-service reorders with dedicated prices and terms	Large catalogues, frequent reorders, distributor networks	Integration with ERP, inventory and price lists
B2B marketplace	Reaches buyers where you have no network	Standardised products, testing new countries	Price competition, platform fees, mediated relationship
Virtual trade fairs and institutional showcases	Visibility with selected buyers, backed by trade agencies such as Italy's ICE	First entry into a market	Time-limited programmes, changing terms
EDI	Automatic orders and invoices between business systems	A few large customers with steady volumes	Dedicated technical project

Multilingual website: localise rather than translate

A buyer in Germany or the UAE judges a supplier partly by its website: technical sheets, certifications, lead times and contacts in their own language. Google recommends declaring language versions with the hreflang attribute, with every version pointing to all the others; without reciprocal links the annotations may be ignored. For the copy, start from AI translation software with human review and a technical glossary approved by sales.

B2B portal and marketplace: margin versus discovery

A login-only portal serves customers who already buy from you: their country's price list, order history, stock. Shopify and WordPress with WooCommerce offer features or extensions for customer-specific pricing; what makes the difference is the link to ERP and warehouse, as covered in the guide on the future of B2B e-commerce.

A marketplace is a test bench. In 2022 Italy's trade agency ICE renewed its Italian Pavilion on Alibaba.com, a permanent online trade fair with 1,000 funded places for 24 months, training and advertising credits; check current deadlines and terms before relying on similar programmes. A marketplace shows which countries and products generate enquiries, but your best customers belong in your own CRM.

How much does it cost to sell on a B2B marketplace?

Beyond the time spent on enquiries and catalogue upkeep, the main cost is sales commission or subscription fees, which vary by platform. One documented example is ICE's project with Faire, a B2B marketplace connecting brands and retailers in more than 30 countries for fashion, home, beauty, jewellery and non-fresh food: ICE funds participation, but logistics and commissions stay with the company, at 25% on every first order and 15% on reorders.

Compare those percentages with the margin you give a distributor. If a marketplace costs as much as an intermediary, it has to bring customers you could not reach on your own; if it only brings customers you would have found anyway, move them to your portal.

Does B2B e-commerce replace importers and distributors?

Usually not, and it should not. In the Riso Scotti case the digital channels work alongside relationships with importers and distributors. The real risk is channel conflict: the same product offered online on terms that undercut whoever represents you in that country.

Territories: if you have an exclusive distributor, exclude that country from the marketplace or route enquiries to them. The rules of the ICE-Faire project, for example, ask companies to declare sales restrictions such as exclusive distribution contracts.
Prices: price lists by country or customer type, consistent across portal, marketplace and sales network.
Leads: website enquiries from a covered country go to the distributor, with a CRM record of who received them and how they ended.
Partner communication: a login area with price lists, technical sheets, localised materials and product news cuts emails and calls and makes the relationship more transparent.

Used this way, digital takes the repetitive work (document requests, stock checks, order status) off importers and agents and leaves them the negotiations.

How do you find foreign buyers with trade fairs, ABM and a CRM?

Foreign leads arrive from different channels over long timeframes: the winners collect them in one place and follow up methodically. A CRM is the database where every company and contact has a status, source, country, language and next action.

Trade fairs are still where relationships start, and they need preparation and follow-up content, as covered in the guide to B2B events with integrated communication. When prospects are few and identifiable, say the top 50 distribution chains in one country, account-based marketing works best, with messages built for each account. With distant buyers, a B2B webinar in their language can serve as the first meeting.

A typical flow for a foreign lead, which can be automated with n8n or Make (see the guide to business process automation for where to start):

The enquiry arrives from the website form, the marketplace or a badge scanned at a trade fair.
The CRM creates or updates the company with country, language, channel and product of interest.
The lead is assigned to the area manager or distributor for that country, who gets a notification.
The contact gets a reply in their language with the catalogue and an offer to book a call.
If there is no reply, scheduled follow-ups start, all of them tracked.

An example scenario: a foodservice equipment manufacturer with 400 SKUs and distributors in five countries. The site in four languages captures enquiries from countries with no network, the marketplace tests the Middle East and Asia, the portal handles distributor reorders, and the CRM shows every month which countries produce deals. This is the kind of website, CRM and automation system I design for B2B and e-commerce companies.

Which data should you use to pick markets and measure digital export?

Before investing in a country, look at the signals you already have. The Performance report in Google Search Console can group clicks and impressions by country: a market that generates searches and visits without any effort from you is a candidate. Add enquiries from the website and marketplace, your current distributors' countries and contacts from past trade fairs.

After launch, a handful of metrics is enough, always split by country and channel:

Metric	What it measures	Where to find it
Clicks and impressions by country	Organic interest in your chosen markets	Search Console, website analytics
Qualified enquiries	Contacts whose company, country and product match your target	CRM
Time to first response	How long a buyer waits for a useful reply	CRM, marketplace dashboard
Open deals and quotes sent	How many enquiries become real opportunities	CRM
Orders and reorders	Revenue and loyalty of foreign customers	ERP, B2B portal
Cost per qualified enquiry	Spend on platforms, ads and trade fairs for each useful contact	Accounts and CRM

These numbers support one concrete decision: which countries and channels deserve more budget next quarter. For the data to land in one place, website, marketplace, CRM and ERP need to talk to each other; on setting up the tools, see the guide on choosing between an all-in-one platform and an integrated stack.

What should you check before selling online abroad?

The most common obstacles are tax, contractual and logistical, not technical.

Intra-EU VAT: for goods shipped to a business in another EU country you do not charge VAT if the customer has a valid EU VAT number, checked through VIES before invoicing.
Incoterms: the International Chamber of Commerce's Incoterms 2020 rules are eleven terms that set out the tasks, costs and risks of delivery. State them in quotes, order confirmations and portal terms.
Payments: bank transfer, deferred terms, letters of credit or online payment each change risk and cash flow; see the guide to B2B payments.
Logistics and customs: non-EU destinations need customs documents and realistic lead times; involve your freight forwarder and customs broker early. On processes, see the guide to digitising logistics.
EORI number: it is mandatory for customs clearance of all customs operations in the EU, exports included. It is assigned by the customs authority of the EU country where the business is established and does not expire.
If you also sell to consumers: distance sales of goods to private customers in other EU countries follow different VAT rules from B2B, with a €10,000 threshold below which they may stay subject to VAT in the seller's country. The One Stop Shop (OSS) lets you declare and pay the VAT due in other countries by registering in a single Member State instead of each one.

Is there public funding for digital export?

For Italian companies, yes, but programmes change often: treat them as opportunities to check, not as the basis of the plan.

SIMEST e-commerce line: SIMEST, the Italian export-finance agency, offers subsidised loans for projects selling goods or services made in Italy or under an Italian brand abroad, through a new or upgraded own platform or a store on a marketplace. According to Assolombarda's summary, eligible spend runs from €10,000 up to 20% of average revenue over the last two financial statements, capped at €500,000; in January 2026 the fixed rate was 0.319%, over a maximum of 4 years including 2 years' grace. Some SMEs (youth-led, women-led, innovative, or with a significant share of export revenue) can also request a grant of up to 10%, capped at €100,000. The platform must allow the purchase to be completed: a lead-only website does not qualify.
ICE marketplace agreements: ICE, Italy's trade agency, runs digital export training and agreements with major marketplaces and online retailers, including Amazon, Alibaba.com, Ocado and Yoox, to open channels Italian SMEs would struggle to reach. Each project has sector and product requirements and limited places: the Faire project, for example, admits up to 100 new companies and is fully funded by ICE.
Self-assessment and guidance: on Promos Italia's DigIT Export portal, linked to the Italian Chambers of Commerce, the DigIT Test measures how digitally ready a company is to sell in foreign markets; the portal also offers guidance and partner search.

Outside Italy, check your national export agency and chamber of commerce for similar programmes. For an overview of Italian grants for websites, e-commerce and automation, see the guide to Italian digitalisation grants.

How to apply it in your company: first steps

Pick 2-3 priority markets from data you already have: countries sending enquiries or visits (Search Console by country), where you have distributors, where competitors operate.
Agree the rules with your network: territories, price lists and enquiry handling with distributors and agents, before publishing prices or opening a marketplace store.
Give each channel a role and one main metric: qualified enquiries for the site, reorders for the portal, open deals for the marketplace.
Localise the pages that sell: home, categories, technical sheets and contacts in the chosen languages, with correct hreflang.
Connect everything to the CRM with country, language and source fields, and track time to first response against an internal target such as one business day.
Review results every quarter by channel and country, and move budget and time to where they pay off.

Mistakes to avoid

Translating the site word for word without adapting units, certifications and contacts.
Opening a marketplace store with nobody answering within the platform's response times.
Publishing online prices that clash with your local distributors' prices.
Leaving trade fair and marketplace contacts outside the CRM.
Selling on a marketplace in countries covered by an exclusive distributor without excluding them.
Building the plan around a grant or programme without checking eligibility, places and deadlines.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

What is the difference between B2B and B2C digital export?

B2B digital export covers sales to foreign businesses through digital channels such as login-only portals, B2B marketplaces and EDI; B2C covers online sales of consumer goods to consumers, direct or through online retailers. According to Politecnico di Milano's Digital Export Observatory, Italian B2B digital exports were worth about €175 billion in 2022 and B2C €18.7 billion.

Is it worth selling on Alibaba.com or another B2B marketplace?

It is worth it for standardised products and for testing markets where you have no sales network. Plan for daily handling of enquiries and for price competition. Use it as a discovery channel, then move your best customers into your own CRM.

Do you need a multilingual website to export?

To capture enquiries from foreign buyers, yes, at least for categories, technical sheets and contacts. Versions should be localised and linked with the hreflang attribute, as Google recommends. English alone can be enough at first if your target buyers work in English.

How does VAT work on online B2B sales to other EU countries?

For goods shipped to a business in another EU country you do not charge VAT if the customer has a valid EU VAT number, verified through VIES. If the number is not valid, you usually charge VAT at your own country's rate.

How long does it take to see results from digital export?

It depends on your sales cycle: in B2B a foreign deal often takes several months. Track qualified enquiries and open deals by country first, and judge revenue over a longer horizon with quarterly reviews.

Does selling online abroad mean bypassing distributors and agents?

Not if the channel is designed with them: exclusive countries left out of the marketplace, consistent price lists by country, and website enquiries routed to the local partner and tracked in the CRM. In the Riso Scotti case, digital channels work alongside relationships with importers and distributors.

Is there funding to open an online store or a marketplace store abroad?

For Italian companies, yes. SIMEST's e-commerce line offers subsidised loans for an own platform or a marketplace store selling Italian-made or Italian-branded products abroad, as long as buyers can complete the purchase. ICE also has agreements with several marketplaces for Italian companies. Eligibility, amounts and windows change, so check the official sites before relying on them.

Sources

To work out which mix of website, portal, marketplace and CRM makes sense for your export markets, start with a free diagnosis.