XPO Market: B2B Marketplace for Trade Show Professionals

Trade show and event teams often search for suppliers through Google, referrals, trade publications, or old directories. That costs time and produces results that are hard to compare.

Providers have the opposite problem. They may offer booth construction, rental inventory, graphics, AV, logistics, or staffing, but qualified buyers reach them through scattered channels.

• Buyers need categories, location context, prices, offer type, and direct communication.
• Sellers need drafts, publishing control, images, visibility, and team permissions.
• Agencies and companies need to separate multiple organizations or brands cleanly.
• The marketplace needed localization and preparation for different country contexts.

CERTAINCE developed a localized Next.js app with public marketplace pages, protected buyer and seller areas, organization management, listing details, saved searches, wishlists, and direct messaging.

Listings can be created manually, saved as drafts, uploaded by CSV or spreadsheet, prepared from images, or imported from XPO Inventory. Publishing remains a separate step so sellers can review drafts before they go live.

AI flows take the busywork out of listing: from a few details and product photos, the app drafts a ready-to-use listing with title, category, description, and specifications, plus a note on what to double-check. Sellers review and adjust everything before publishing.

The app supports German, Polish, and English. Localized routes, copy, and legal pages create the basis for a European marketplace rather than a single-language product surface.

Search combines text search, categories, price range, offer or request type, sorting, and location filters. When a location is set, results can be sorted by distance and narrowed by radius.

Search understands the meaning behind a query: OpenAI embeddings and PostgreSQL vector search surface relevant listings even when the search term and listing text do not use the exact same words.

Communication stays in the product. Buyers can contact sellers directly from listing details, continue conversations in the inbox, and track unread messages.

Paid visibility was implemented through promotions: highlight, single or repeated bump, top listing, and gallery placement. Purchases run through Stripe Checkout and activate only after the payment is confirmed.

The payment boundary is deliberately narrow. XPO Market does not process listing purchases, bookings, escrow, or shipping labels. Payments only cover promotion packages for active listings.

The internal import from XPO Inventory is secured against outside access and limited to approved organizations. Imported articles enter the marketplace as drafts so sellers keep control over category, price, and publication.

XPO Market covers the core of a specialized B2B marketplace: public discovery, listing management, organization permissions, messaging, promotions, and inventory imports.

Buyers can find suppliers in a more structured way. Sellers can publish services and rental inventory under their control and buy visibility without the marketplace taking over operational booking or payment processes.

Together with XPO Inventory, the product set connects internal article management on one side with external commercialization and buyer communication on the other.