What B2B Data Providers Sell, and the Category That Is Missing

B2B data providers sell three things: contact data, firmographic data and intent data. That is the whole shelf, and it is the taxonomy every buying guide repeats. There is a fourth kind of data — a dated event on one specific store — and it is almost never on that shelf, for a structural reason worth understanding before you buy.

Disclosure first. We build Keaz Signals, which sells ecommerce leads with live buying signals. We are a competitor to several of the companies ranking for this term, and the fourth category below is the one we sell. Read the rest with that in mind. We have tried to describe the other three accurately, because accuracy costs us nothing here.

One observation about the search results, since it shaped this page. On 27 September 2026 we pulled the live United States English results for the term through DataForSEO. Nine of the nine organic results on page one were vendor-authored round-ups, and each ranked its own product at or near the top. The AI Overview above them named three categories of B2B data and no fourth. That absence is why this page exists.

Contact data is who a person is and how to reach them. Firmographic data is what the company is. Intent data is an inference that someone there may be in-market. Each answers a different question, and a provider strong at one is not automatically strong at another.

Contact data answers who. Name, role, company, email address. It is the oldest layer and it decays continuously, because people change jobs whether or not a database notices. Most of what is sold as enrichment is this layer being repaired — see where the enrichment waterfall runs dry.

Firmographic data answers what kind. Industry, headcount, revenue band, country, technologies installed. It is how you cut a universe down to a segment, and it is stable by design. That is its strength as a filter and its weakness as a trigger: a company that matched your profile last March still matches today, which tells you nothing about today.

Intent data answers maybe now. It is inferred from content consumption or social activity — an inference about a company rather than an observation of one.

The fourth kind of data is neither an attribute nor an inference. It is an event with a date attached to a named business. This store started running Meta ads on Tuesday. This store installed an email marketing tool last week. This store launched a product. This store rebuilt its storefront.

The difference from the other three is the timestamp, and the timestamp is the point. Contact and firmographic records describe a steady state; they are as true in June as in January, which means they can tell you who to contact but never when. Intent data has a date, but it is attached to an inference drawn from a signal the company did not intend to send.

An event is something the business did on purpose, in public, on its own property. A store that just put budget behind new ads has made a decision about growth, and it made it on a particular day. That is a narrower claim than intent — it does not say anyone wants to buy from you — but it is an observation rather than a guess, and you can put a date on it.

The full list of the events we watch is on our buying signal catalogue.

Because producing it is a different business from selling it. Contact and firmographic records can be licensed, merged, resold and licensed onward; the same underlying file can sit behind several brands. An event on a storefront cannot be licensed from anyone, because nobody is holding it. It has to be observed.

Observing it means looking at the storefront itself, repeatedly, and noticing what changed since the last look. That is a crawling and comparison problem, and the cost scales with how many stores you watch and how often you return to each one. A database that is refreshed quarterly cannot produce it at all — not because the vendor is careless, but because the refresh interval is longer than the useful life of the event.

For our part: we watch 4.1 million Shopify and WooCommerce stores across Europe and North America and re-scrape them weekly, as of September 2026. That is the production cost of the fourth category, and it is the reason it tends to come from specialists rather than from the general providers ranking for this term.

It is also a narrower business. Watching storefronts well means watching a defined set of platforms in a defined set of markets, which is a real limit rather than a modest one. We come back to that below.

Four categories, four different questions answered before an email goes out:

• Contact data — who to address, and at what address. Says nothing about whether to write at all.
• Firmographic data — whether this company is the kind you serve. Excellent as a filter, useless as a reason to send this week rather than next quarter.
• Intent data — whether someone there may be researching a purchase. A probability, usually at company level, usually without naming the person or the day.
• Event data — what this specific business did, and when. Gives you the opening line and the reason the message arrives now.

These are complements, not substitutes. An event with no contact attached is unusable, and a contact with no event attached is a cold list. Most outreach that fails does so because it bought one layer and assumed the others.

Plainly, and without hedging. For most people searching this term, a general provider is the correct purchase and we are the wrong tool.

If you sell to enterprises, hospitals, manufacturers or agencies rather than to storefronts, there is no fourth category for you to buy. Contact and firmographic coverage is the whole job, and the established providers do it at a scale we do not attempt.

If you need the records out of the tool, buy a general provider. We do not export. Leads move into campaigns and stay there. For teams with an established CRM pipeline that is a dealbreaker, and it should be.

If your buyers are on LinkedIn, we cover a channel we do not touch. We have no LinkedIn signals, no LinkedIn sending, and no plans to add them. And if your market sits outside Europe and North America, or your buyers run on a platform other than Shopify and WooCommerce, we do not see them at all.

Vendor-by-vendor detail, including the rows where we lose, sits on our honest comparison pages.

Three claims a page like this is expected to make, and will not.

We are not going to tell you how many records any named provider holds, or what share of them is stale. Those numbers circulate widely in round-ups of this category, almost always without a source and usually published by someone selling the alternative. We have not measured them, so we are not going to repeat them.

We are not going to compare price per record. What each product meters is not the same thing — a contact, a credit, an enrichment, a watched store — and a table that pretends otherwise would be dishonest.

And we are not going to tell you which category is lawful for you to use. We are GDPR-conscious by design and we will not claim more than that. Responsibility for what you send stays with you.

What we will say is structural: an observation of something a business published itself is a different object from a record about a person assembled elsewhere. That is a difference in how the data is produced, not a claim about anyone's compliance.

Start from the question you cannot answer, not from the vendor list. Not knowing who to write to is a contact data problem; writing to the wrong kind of company is a firmographic one. Knowing who and what but not when is the gap the first three cannot close.

A practical test before you buy: ask the refresh interval, and compare it with how long the thing you care about stays true. Quarterly is fine for headcount and useless for an ad launch. That mismatch is where most disappointing data purchases come from.

On the third category specifically, we went further in what each intent data category can see.

If your buyers run Shopify or WooCommerce stores in Europe or North America, the fourth category is what you are missing. Our ecommerce leads database starts with 1,000 free leads, contacts included. If not, take one of the other three.

• Own measurement, DataForSEO, United States / English, 27 September 2026: live organic results for the head term, plus Google Ads volume of 880/mo as a 12-month average and 263/mo across June–August 2026, CPC $69.18, keyword difficulty 22.
• Google AI Overview for the same query and locale, observed 27 September 2026. Not linked: AI Overviews have no stable URL to cite.
• Keaz Signals buying signal catalogue, retrieved September 2026 — the event types referenced above.
• Keaz Signals ecommerce leads database, retrieved September 2026 — coverage of 4.1 million Shopify and WooCommerce stores, weekly re-scrape, Europe and North America. This figure moves; it is accurate as of September 2026.