Unite: From marketplace to procurement partner

Unite’s enterprise sales manager, Bob Van de Laar, on transforming indirect procurement through transparency, efficiency and trust…

As European procurement faces unprecedented complexity, indirect spend remains one of its toughest challenges. Fragmented supplier bases, compliance pressures and the growing weight of sustainability reporting continue to stretch teams already asked to do more with less. 

For Unite, formerly known as Mercateo, tackling those challenges has been its mission for over 25 years. Building on its roots in European procurement, Unite now enables compliant, ESG-driven, and audit-ready procurement aligned with EU frameworks, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), German regulation for public procurement below the EU threshold (UVgO), and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive(CSRD) – promoting responsible, transparent, and fair business practices. As a trusted European alternative to global marketplaces, Unite champions a model built on trust, compliance and long-term partnership.

Today, Unite marks its next evolution – from marketplace to procurement partner – empowering procurement teams to achieve measurable performance built on efficiency, transparency and trust.

Van de Laar explains that procurement teams are being asked to juggle multiple priorities and want to focus on strategic initiatives. Still, indirect procurement often takes up a disproportionate amount of their time. Unite’s role, he says, is to simplify that through one environment that delivers efficiency, transparency and compliance without compromising control.

From marketplace to procurement partner

Unite operates as a platform that combines a marketplace with procurement services. across 12 countries, serving over 40,000 customers with access to over 100+ million products from thousands of pre-vetted suppliers. This provides organisations with broad choice while enabling procurement teams to maintain full oversight.

Traditionally, Unite’s strength lay in creating a single, digital buying environment for catalogue-based goods. But as markets mature and digitalisation deepens, the company has evolved into something more sophisticated: a procurement performance partner. Read the full story here!