How Magento Features Help to Resolve B2B eCommerce Challenges

We know that to build an eCommerce b2b website, there are many platforms to choose but it has to be chosen based on the requirements of the business. Each and every platform that is available come in with different licensing models and pricing too and hence you will have to look into the cost aspect too that are development, maintenance and licensing.

B2B buyers want a platform that is intuitive, easy and gives a self-serve shopping experience. Out of all the options that we have available, Magento eCommerce solution has become the most chosen one because of the below B2B features.

Features of B2B Magento Platform

Account Management:  This is the main feature for any business store and it empowers the admins of the store in the management of accounts, permissions, and roles with great assurance.

Negotiated pricing terms:  All the customer accounts can be personalized with the help of terms and price lists that are pre-negotiated.

Quick Order:  This feature helps in streamlining all the bulk orders easily and quickly. Manual management of the same would take a whole lot of time.

ERP Connectors:  This feature facilitates seamless integration with the back-end systems.

Inventory Tracking:  This feature will help the business owner to have a close tracking of the inventory across all the multiple locations of the warehouse.

Mobile Responsive Design:  With Magento B2B features you will be able to facilitate your customers as well as the sales staff for placing an order with the help their smartphones too.  Any time and any device is the luxury that one gets with B2B Magento responsive design.

With above-mentioned features, it becomes extremely easy to solve many problems that the B2B eCommerce store owners may come across.

Magento to Resolve B2B Challenges

Different pricing for each customer: 

When we are talking about B2B eCommerce owners, you will notice that they will be having different pricing for each of the customers, basically depending upon the kind of volume of the order they place for every year. This can be done in different ways.  You could probably give them volume discounts based on the product level.  There are many such B2B eCommerce owners who have successfully put Magento to use. Another option that you could have is to create different groups of customers wherein you assign a certain percentage of discounts for each of these groups. This will ensure that you are offering more discounts to a customer who is buying higher volumes. Magento Enterprise offers this feature.

Orders are generally very large: 

Generally, customers would, in a testing mode, place a small order first and then a large order later. So, as a business owner, you must ensure that you have the capacity to accommodate such large orders too. You have to provide them the confidence that regardless of the volume of the order that has been placed, they will get the order delivered.

Have informative product descriptions and pages that show product details with robust layered navigation.  Also, having an attribute filtering model may be extremely useful. Having search technologies will also enhance the search functionality on the eCommerce platform.

Need credit line: 

Any business can definitely make use of credit lines that they get. As most of the B2B customers engage in buying bulk quantities from suppliers, they will clear the invoice at a later date after receiving the stock.

Different payment options: 

The eCommerce store has to accommodate payment options described above. Ensure that your store can also take in payments through multiple options so that your customers can choose the method that is easy for them.

Freight shipping: 

Freight shipping becomes essential owing to the volumes that the B2B eCommerce owners sell when compared to the B2C eCommerce owners. You also need to be clear about the complex shipping rules that you may have in place for these matters need to be clear in order to give the customer a clear idea about the estimate while products are being shipped. It is essential to state that the products can be shipped only from Monday through Friday.

There are various technologies in shipping and fulfillment that are amenable to the Magento platform and can be integrated so as to aid in streamlining and automating the freight shipping and complex shipping.

Large amounts of SKUs and data: 

Having SKUs is essential if you are one of those B2B companies. And likewise, there are thousands of other attributes too in terms of color, height, size and such complex data which the customer is keen on going through before making a purchase.

So, you will have to first ensure that you can handle huge amounts of attributes, SKUs and then organize them efficiently. There may also be data needs which need to be handled even if complex. When you are getting a Magento platform, ensure that your website can handle all the data integration that is needed for the store.

Integrations are key: 

If you wish to keep all your operations in check, it is essential that you connect your email marketing platform, CRM and other technologies to your ERP. If these systems do not facilitate an exchange of data smoothly amongst themselves, getting data entry work may turn out to be expensive or cumbersome too. There may not be any consistency between the different technologies that are used and this makes running of the eCommerce store a nightmare.

You will have to choose such a platform which is flexible for integration with the different kind of systems that you have or may get in the future. Choosing a platform that has pre-built solutions will prove to be an economical choice when compared to custom integration.

Testing: 

When you have chosen Magento as THE platform for your B2B eCommerce needs, you will have to think about its management and ways in which you could better its performance. When you have a robust development and operations system and strong testing mechanism in place, you can be stress-free as far as the complexities are concerned. There is software that can help in automating the same or ensuring that the application will run smoothly.

B2B buyers actually demand an experience on the eCommerce platform that is seamless, personalized and most importantly efficient as they come across in the B2C sites. When you make use of this you can easily enable the self-serve feature so that your customers can easily place their orders. Management of wholesale as well as retail channels can happen through a single platform. You are getting enterprise standard flexibility, extensibility, functionality as well as performance…all these at a fraction of the cost that the other platforms would come in at.

Why be left behind when the entire world is going towards Magento to leverage the benefits it has to offer?  Get in touch with us and our Magento experts will take you through a tour of all the features in detail!