How eSignatures eliminatetransaction complexity for
B2B marketplaces

Contents
1. Introduction: B2B marketplaces’ procurement hurdle

2. Onboard suppliers faster3. Combat leakage with an all-in-one buying and selling experience

4. Facilitate the transactions your marketplace needs

5. Reduce post-deal admin

6. Protect participants against fraud 7. The Dropbox Sign API is built for B2B marketplaces

B2B marketplaces’
procurement hurdle
B2B marketplaces are on the up and up.
And with good reason: B2B marketplaces give buyers greater
choice and value while offering sellers access to a broader pool ofbuyers. Gartner even predicts that at least 70% of enterprisemarketplaces launched will serve B2B transactions by 2023. 

However, there’s a misconception that building a successful
marketplace is as simple as matching demand with supply. In
reality, marketplace creation and growth involves much more,
especially in B2B, where there’s more complexity than youraverage eCommerce transaction.

What’s more, risk-averse decision-makers are content to take an “if it
ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude to procurement, making longstanding
direct relationships with suppliers even harder to disrupt.

For one, navigating a flock of stakeholders in the buying decisionand negotiating over terms makes the sales cycle much more
complicated than your average eCommerce transaction. 

To challenge this one-to-one relationship status quo and build athriving ecosystem of buyers and suppliers, B2B marketplace
operators need to find ways to abstract the complexity fromparticipants on both sides so the experience feels closer to a B2C one. 

Then there are large corporate procurement departments thatmust investigate scale, quality, and reliability. This is especiallytrue for the more complicated purchases that fall under the label“indirect spend:” everything from IT to transportation, professional
services, and marketing.

Today’s winning B2B marketplaces are delivering benefits beyond justtrusted relationships to attract and retain participants. Self-service
environments where vendors and buyers can transact faster, at a better
price, and manage procurement, logistics, insurance, payments, andmore in one place is the key to a thriving B2B marketplace.

And eSignatures offer a significant
step in the right direction for B2B
marketplaces by delivering:
Faster ways to onboard supplier
Easier workflows for buyers and sellers to transac
Leakage-proof buying experiences
Reduced post-deal admin from transacting partie
Trust with reliable fraud protection

Here’s howeSignatures
make all thispossible.

Onboard suppliers faster
Every marketplace operator would agree the more suppliers theWhile there’s no silver-bullet for supplier onboarding and due

better. But onboarding suppliers onto your marketplace is no easy

diligence, you can speed up the process by streamlining theprocess.

information collection and signing process with eSignatures. 

First, there are all the supplier product and service details you need

Streamlining the supplier onboarding process with eSignatures to collect and contracts to get signed.

With Dropbox Sign document templates, you can format aThen there’s verifying if supplier products and services are

document once and then reuse it again and again. This functionality

legitimate. This is critical to building credibility into your B2B

is perfect for high-volume onboarding documents like contracts,

marketplace because just one bad experience can undermine

agreements, NDAs, SLAs, and more.

months or years of trust-building. 

What’s more, with features like Dropbox Sign Bulk send you can

But building trust is easier said than done. Due diligence demands asend a large number of documents or signature requests to different

load of data, documentation, and fact-checking. And without

suppliers at one time. Instead of sending requests one by one, youeffective tools that can process all of this information, it can quickly

can send completely personalized requests in batches of up to 250.

bottleneck and slow things down. Not only does this leave suppliers
waiting, it also reduces the choice and competition that buyers cometo your marketplace for.

“Due diligence demands a load of data,
documentation, and fact-checking. And
without effective tools that can process allof this information, it can quickly bottleneckand slow things down. While there’s nosilver-bullet for supplier onboarding and due
diligence, you can speed up the process bystreamlining the information collection andsigning process with eSignatures.”Customer story

Instacart accelerates contractorapplication completion by 270%
At any given time, Instacart contracts over 10,000 personal
shoppers who handle the shop, pack, and deliver groceries to
Instacart’s customers. Initially, Instacart relied on traditional penand-paper signatures to onboard new personal shoppers. But theapplication process for new contractors was awkward.

“Under the old system, there was considerable friction in the signup and onboarding process. We had staff in the office that would
scan all of the documents as well as manage the process of getting
the paperwork complete. We were losing qualified service providersbefore they’d even shopped their first order. It wasn’t a sustainablemodel as we looked to scale out the business,” says Instacart CoFounder Max Mullen.

With the Dropbox Sign API, Instacart digitized individual
documents that previously required printing and scanning. Now
Instacart can take the shopper information provided during thesign-up process and populate all the necessary paperwork, generate
a set of personalized PDFs, and send out the finished documents for
new personal shoppers to electronically sign. With fields like “name”
and “address” automatically filled in, redundant steps are
eliminated, as is the friction that previously caused applicant dropoff.

And the results speak for themselves. Instacart saw a 270%
increase in speed to completion for applications and saved 50+
hours saved per week onboarding shoppers.

Combat leakage with an all-in-one
buying and selling experience

The core value proposition of any worthwhile B2B marketplace is toconnect demand with supply at the right price. But just because youconnect the two doesn’t mean each party will transact on yourplatform (despite the rules). 

In fact, inject too much complexity or too many steps into the buying
process, and you risk platform leakage—that is, suppliers and buyers
move their deals off your platform. To prevent platform leakage, B2B
marketplaces must offer easier, more streamlined buying and selling
experiences than off-platform alternatives.

But that’s easier said than done. Often B2B buying processes involvea mini-RFP process and require several departments on both sides—
not to mention sophisticated user management features to support
different individuals with different authorization rights anddelegations of authority.

To simplify these long-winded deal processes, and keep transactions
on your platform, you want to give each party an easy way to sign
contracts, change terms, and pay via invoice on your platform. 

Create complete signingworkflows with eSignatures
Dropbox’s eSignature product called Dropbox Sign makes
facilitating and completing transactions faster and easierthrough automation. Here’s how:

Embedded signing: Instead of emailing out agreements,
they’re embedded seamlessly into your app or website withjust a few lines of code, so buyers and sellers can signcontracts directly on your marketplace without ever having
to switch windows or applications.

Custom signing logic: Dealing with multiple authorizations
can be a messy business. But Dropbox Sign has
customizable logic that lets you dictate the order of signers,so documents are always signed in the right order by theright people.

Group signing:
Send agreements to a group of recipients when only one
signature is required. Casting a wider net returns acompleted signature process faster, rather than waiting for
one person to respond.

Automated notifications:
Say you send a contract to a buyer. Once they’ve signed
the document, the Dropbox Sign API automatically notifies
the seller that it’s complete and they can move on withdelivering the goods.
When you combine automated notifications, embedded
templates, and group sign features, it speeds up the entire
procurement process and makes your marketplace thepreferred way for buyers and sellers to transact.

“When you combine automatednotifications, embedded templates, andgroup sign features, it speeds up theentire procurement process and makes
your marketplace the preferred way forbuyers and sellers to transact.“Facilitate the transactions
your marketplace needs
Large transaction sizes often rule out online credit card payments as anoption for B2B marketplaces. That means accommodating more
appropriate payment methods like invoicing. 

It’s one thing to give participants the payment methods they want, butthey could do that just as easily away from your marketplace. That’s why
you need to make the process easier than the off-platform alternatives. 

One way is by reducing the inconsistencies between contracts andinvoices—and the arduous process of distributing them to theappropriate parties promptly every time there’s an error or change.

Reduce errors and speed up
transactions with eSignature integration
By using APIs to integrate eSignature capability into your existing
systems, you can pull data directly from invoices into contracts and viceversa. That means the data on your contracts always matches the info on
your invoices. Additionally, it saves your team a load of admin time
because there’s no double handling of data. 

Here’s how it’s helped AdvicePay synchronize contracts and invoices for50% faster contract management.

Customer story

AdvicePay speeds user contract management by 50% with Dropbox Sign
Championing an innovative fee-for-service model for financial
planning, AdvicePay created a billing and payment platform tosupport this growth strategy. However, in the early version of
AdvicePay’s application, its users could only send invoices toclients and collect payment. Users needed to use an entirely
separate application to sign documents, which meant their clients
had to navigate multiple systems just to work with them. 

This was time-consuming, prone to data errors that delayed
payment or required client refunds if contract and invoice fee data
didn’t match, and resulted in a cumbersome client onboarding
experience. Then AdvicePay implemented Dropbox Sign.

“HelloSign’s [now Dropbox Sign] embedded experience allows us now todeliver a seamless user experience that links invoices with corresponding
contracts. The full white-labeling functionality enables us to own theeSignature experience, abstract it from our users, and ensure they never
have to leave AdvicePay to transact business,” says Joe Timmer, AdvicePay’s
Lead Developer.

“When a user creates an invoice in AdvicePay, our application automaticallycreates a contract in HelloSign [now Dropbox Sign] and pulls the invoice
amount and other key data fields into the contract so the documents are
100% synced. Now, users don’t touch the contract because it’s 100%controlled via the HelloSign [now Dropbox Sign] API from data in oursystem. They never have to leave AdvicePay and they can manage, track, anddownload all their contracts from our application. The invoice-contract data
match helps them align accounts payable with accounts receivable, which
can dramatically improve their bottom line,” says Joe Timmer, LeadDeveloper at AdvicePay.

And it’s had a profound impact on AdvicePay’s output, leading to 50% fastertime to manage contracts for users and 100% synchronization of invoices
and contracts which has improved advisor bottom line.

“HelloSign’s [now Dropbox Sign]
embedded experience allows us now todeliver a seamless user experience thatlinks invoices with corresponding
contracts. The full white-labeling
functionality enables us to own theeSignature experience, abstract it fromour users, and ensure they never have toleave AdvicePay to transact business.”— Joe Timmer, AdvicePay’s Lead Developer

eSignature automation increases
your document efficiency 

Reduce post-deal admin
Just because each party has signed on the dotted line
doesn't mean a marketplace’s work is done. 

Once an order is placed, there’s still a ton of deal admin foreveryone involved, from confirming the availability of goods
in stock and sending an invoice to the buyer to organizing
compliance checks and orchestrating the various support
services like logistics and insurance.

That’s a lot of organization—and a lot of documents tocurate, customize, manage, and send.

But a solid eSignature solution can alleviate much of thisadmin burden with smart document automation.

With sophisticated document management
tools like auto-populating templates, you canbuild templated documents for all your repeatforms. That means forms like compliancechecks, insurance agreements, logistics
agreements, and SLAs only need minor
tweaks and they’re ready to send out.

What’s more, using data from your existingcustomer management systems, you canautomatically fill in important details like
name, address, and invoice totals reducing theamount of paperwork each party needs tocomplete, speeding up transactions.

Protect participants
against fraud
As effective and efficient as they are, disputes still
inevitably arise on marketplaces. 

Perhaps a buyer goes insolvent and can’t pay, goods aredamaged, or there’s an operational mistake. Theseunavoidable mishaps are the cost of doing business.

While these are hard to spot before they happen, there are
steps you can take to safeguard those participants that fallvictim. One such measure is a tamper-proof paper trail thatshows exactly who agreed to what and when. 

And then there’s fraud.

Protect your users and yourself with traceable audit trails Fraudulent actors—like buyers who pretend goods
haven’t arrived or never had the intention of paying forthem—pose a risk to legitimate participants, and to yourability to maintain a trusted reputation on yourmarketplace. 

Audit trails keep track of the details necessary to verify thelegality of a paper trail and also act as an added level of
security for users. These audit trails include the time ofsignature, IP addresses for signers and senders, and when adocument has been opened. 

Any worthwhile eSignature tool will also create a noneditable audit trail that ensures every action on yourdocuments is thoroughly tracked and time-stamped, so you
have defensible proof of access, review, and signature.

The Dropbox Sign API is built for B2B marketplaces

Customizable templates for fast
document distribution to suppliers

While your average off-the-shelf eSignature tool might deliver
some of the functionality we’ve covered, few can do it all.
Dropbox Sign provides all the automation and customization
B2B marketplaces need to deliver low-complexity transactions
for buyers and sellers, including:

Customizable templates for fast document distribution tosuppliers. By creating templates for repeat supplieronboarding documents, you can send documents out inbulk, reducing delays from document preparation andreducing errors in the process.

An ecosystem of integrations
Dropbox Sign integrates with an entire world of other business apps tomake your business operations faster and easier.
Connect with Salesforce to send documents directly out of your CR
Connect with Gmail to email contracts directly from your inbo
Connect to Dropbox to store all of your documents securely in thecloudSee the full range of Dropbox Sign integrations.

Fully embedded 

Deliver a seamless signing experience by embedding forms directly
into your marketplace’s website or app via API. That way, customers
don’t ever have to leave your marketplace to get everything done. 

See how it works.

Industry-leading setup
With user-friendly documentation, SDKs, and a technical support
team behind you, integrating the Dropbox Sign eSignature API only
takes an average of 2.5 days.

“While your average off-theshelf eSignature tool mightdeliver some of thefunctionality we’ve covered,
few can do it all. HelloSign[now Dropbox Sign] provides
all the automation andcustomization B2B
marketplaces need todeliver low-complexitytransactions for buyers andsellers.”

Try eSignatures on yourmarketplace today
As marketplaces become more popular, more andmore will pop up. But that’s not to say all
marketplaces will succeed and thrive.

The successful ones will be those that make buying
and selling as seamless as possible. That means
removing buyer and seller friction across yourmarketplace. Taking this path not only minimizes
leakage, but it also helps you maintain trust among
participants—which all leads to more high-valuetransactions on your marketplace.

If that’s something you’re interested in try theDropbox Sign API for free.

Or book a demo with our expert API team to see how
eSignatures can work for your business.

Make Dropbox Sign yoursignature move
Dropbox Sign simplifies work for millions ofindividuals. Companies all over the world rely on theDropbox Sign API to power their applications, making
it easier to close deals faster, onboard new hires, save
developers time, complete documents without error,
and much more. For more information visit theDropbox Sign website.