B2B Ecommerce

B2B stands for Business to Business, which means trading between the companies, instead of selling to customer like B2C companies. Examples of B2B are suppliers to manufacturing companies, manufacturer to distributors or wholesaler to retailers. They work on large scale and maintain long term relationships. However, the websites of B2B eCommerce companies are similar to B2C companies. There are product catalogs, payment options, orders, shipping, etc. However, what differs is slightest of the overall user experience.

 

The field of B2B eCommerce is gaining popularity and the businesses expand by getting Magento websites. So, let us take a look at the process of setting up a B2B website on Magento…

 

Private sales: This is the module which lets you hide certain portions of the websites to restrict some customers to access it. This feature of Magento Enterprise lets you send invitations to customers for events. Moreover, it is too flexible to offer time sales to the special customers along with the countdown timer. The last, but certainly not the least, it displays the list of the upcoming events. If you are not using Magento Community instead of Enterprise, you will have to use the extension to reap these benefits.

 

Catalogue and pricing: Most of the merchants wants to run both the stores on one Magento platform; the wholesale as well as retail website. Well, it works well with Magento, as it lets you put up different product catalogues with different prices as well as payment and shipping options for both types of customers. In Magento Enterprise, you can display different product catalogue and prices with the help of ‘Catalog Permissions’ and ‘Customer Group Catalog’. You can use Group Price feature in Magento Community, if you want to put up the price for all the products, but show different numbers. If the price depends upon the volume of the products, you can set it up using the built in ‘Tier Pricing’ feature.

 

Ordering: Most of the wholesale buyers; especially the ones who are coming again to you know what they are looking for, with most of them knowing the SKUs of the products too. If this is the case, ‘Order by SKU’ extension can be used to increase the speed of the bulk ordering process. Although this is not present by default, it can be done using the extension. As soon as the user starts typing the SKU, it shows the list of products. So, all they need to do is select the desired product, mention the quantity and click on the ‘add to cart’ button.

 

Payment: Magento has got the default option of payment by invoice which is also called check/money order. There is no need to make modifications into it unless you have got extended requirements. One more payment option is credit limit which is well known option among B2B customers.

 

Shipping: As shipping should be flexible, it is better to configure it on the basis of per product. You can also use the extension like ‘shipping per item’.

 

Now that you are aware of how to implement B2B eCommerce website on Magento, it is advisable to keep the above mentioned points in mind and share it with maximum people, so as to get the best B2B eCommerce Magento website. Good luck with that!

Share Button