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Navigate naturally between businesses, companies, branches, and products.
B2BCMarket uses a connected entity structure that allows public marketplace entities to remain independently accessible while also maintaining their relationships with related entities.
This creates a navigation experience in which users can move through the marketplace according to the context they need.
Connected Navigation is the way B2BCMarket connects its public marketplace entities through relationships and public catalog URLs.
Instead of treating a Business, Company, Branch, or Product as an isolated page, B2BCMarket allows each entity to provide navigation to its related entities.
The same structure can also be explored in reverse.
Each public entity can have its own public identity and public catalog representation.
Being independently accessible does not mean that the entity is isolated. Its public representation can contain links and references to related entities.
Each public entity can be accessed directly through its own public catalog representation.
Each entity can remain connected to its parent and related marketplace entities.
The primary B2BCMarket relationship follows this hierarchy:
Each level provides additional detail about the marketplace entities below it.
A Business represents the broader business context within B2BCMarket.
From a Business, users can discover the Companies associated with that business.
Each Company can provide its own public catalog URL, allowing the visitor to continue deeper into the marketplace structure.
A Company represents a company-level presence within a Business.
A Company can provide navigation back to its Business and forward to its connected Branches.
This creates navigation in both directions while preserving the business context.
A Branch represents a company's branch or operational location.
A Branch can connect upward to its Company and downward to its available Products.
Branch-level navigation is particularly useful when products are associated with specific operational locations or service areas.
A Product represents a marketplace offering connected to its business context.
From a Product, users can navigate back toward the Branch, Company, and Business associated with the offering.
Users can begin at a broader business entity and move toward more specific marketplace information.
This is useful when a visitor first wants to understand a business and then explore the companies, branches, and products associated with it.
Users do not have to begin at the Business level.
A visitor may discover a Product first and then move upward through the connected marketplace structure.
This is particularly useful for product discovery because the visitor can learn more about the organization behind an offering.
A Product can provide more than product-specific information.
Its connected context can include:
This allows users to evaluate an offering while also understanding where that offering belongs within the marketplace.
The same principle works from the top of the hierarchy.
A Business can expose its connected Companies, while each Company can expose its connected Branches and Products.
Connected Navigation is supported by the public catalog URLs of the entities.
A Business can reference its Companies through their public URLs. A Company can reference its Branches. A Branch can reference its Products. Products can reference their surrounding Business, Company, and Branch context.
Provides direct access to the Business public representation.
Provides direct access to the Company public representation.
Provides direct access to the Branch public representation.
Provides direct access to the Product public representation and its branch context.
The relationships can be viewed as a connected graph rather than only as a simple hierarchy.
The arrows represent relationships that allow users to move between related public entities.
The result is a navigable marketplace graph in which an entity can provide context about the entities connected to it.
Buyers can use connected navigation to investigate marketplace offerings beyond the individual Product page.
For example, a buyer discovering a Product may want to know:
Connected navigation makes these relationships part of the marketplace discovery experience.
Sellers can represent their marketplace presence using the same connected structure that buyers navigate.
Their marketplace structure can connect:
This provides a consistent public representation of the seller's marketplace organization.
Merchants can also benefit from the connected structure because marketplace entities remain related rather than appearing as disconnected listings.
This can provide merchants with a clearer view of the businesses, companies, branches, and products participating in marketplace activity.
The connected relationships are not limited to the visual website.
B2BCMarket also represents its public entity relationships through machine-readable catalog systems.
XML catalog representations, structured data, JSON-LD, sitemaps, and other public machine-readable representations can reflect the same underlying relationships.
The purpose is consistency: the public website and machine-readable catalog should represent the same entity relationships.
Connected Navigation follows the same relationship model used throughout the B2BCMarket architecture.
Public Catalog Pages
XML Catalogs
Structured Data
Sitemaps
Future Public Interfaces
These representations do not need to create separate relationship models. They can represent the same underlying B2BCMarket entity graph.
Consider a buyer who discovers a Product through search or another marketplace entry point.
Step 1: Buyer discovers Product.
Step 2: Buyer explores the related Branch.
Step 3: Buyer explores the Company operating the Branch.
Step 4: Buyer explores the Business associated with the Company.
The buyer can therefore move from a specific marketplace offering to broader business context.
Connected Navigation is a practical expression of the B2BCMarket Connected Entity Architecture (BCEA).
BCEA establishes that every public entity is independently identifiable, independently accessible, and contextually connected to related entities.
B2BCMarket allows users to move through the marketplace without losing the context of the entity they are exploring.
A Business can lead to Companies.
A Company can lead to Branches.
A Branch can lead to Products.
A Product can lead back to its Branch, Company, and Business.
This connected relationship is one of the defining characteristics of the B2BCMarket marketplace architecture.