We work with the associations representing the builders’ merchants, food and drink wholesalers, and industrial distributors that our platform is designed to serve, not as a badge on our website, but as working relationships with the bodies that know their members better than anyone.
We do not pursue trade partnerships for visibility. We pursue them because the members of these bodies are exactly the businesses Apex B2B was built to serve, and the associations themselves understand their members’ operational challenges in a way that no platform vendor ever could.
The Builders Merchants Federation is the authoritative trade body representing the majority of building materials businesses, merchants and suppliers, operating across the UK and Ireland. The sector is one of the most operationally complex in B2B commerce: high-volume repeat ordering, multi-site account structures, complex contract pricing, and deep dependency on ERP systems that were built for a different era. Apex B2B is purpose-built to handle all of it, without asking merchants to change the way their business works to fit the platform.
The FWD is the trade association for food and drink wholesalers in the UK. FWD members supply food and associated products to over 400,000 retail and catering businesses, making food and drink wholesale one of the largest and most operationally intensive B2B sectors in the country. The pressure on these businesses to digitise is acute: high repeat ordering frequency, strict contract pricing, and heavy reliance on manual order intake processes that drain margin and slow growth. Apex B2B is built to automate those processes, not replace the relationships that drive them.
A Trade & Industry Partnership is a working relationship between Apex B2B and a trade association or industry body whose members include B2B businesses that would benefit from the platform. It is not a referral arrangement or a sponsorship. It is a collaboration built around shared interest in helping businesses in the sector digitise their commerce operations more effectively.
If your members are still taking orders by email, managing pricing in spreadsheets, or running on ERP systems that have no eCommerce layer, Apex B2B was built for exactly that world. Trade & Industry Partnerships are built around shared commitment, not generic referral programmes. If you believe your members would benefit from a platform built around how they actually operate, we would like to hear from you.