10 Magento Commerce Features That Are Great for B2B Companies

Adobe Commerce (formerly known asMagento Commerce) is one of the top platforms for B2BeCommerce brands – which is why you may want to choose it for your company’s website.

At IWD, we’ve spent the last 12 yearshelping hundreds of B2B brands grow online by designing, implementing, and optimizing eCommerce sites that lead to increased conversions and better ROIs.

One of the many areas we specialize in isworking with Magento – which happens to bewildlypopular with B2B companies. After working with the platform almost daily for more than a decade, we’ve come to know it inside and out.

In short, it is absolutely stunning when it comes to the kinds of B2B features that no B2B company should be without – right out of the box.

In fact, there are so many of them, I really don't have time to go through them all in just one post, but I do want to go through some of the top features to give you an idea of just how powerful Magento is in case you’re currently in the market for an eCommerce platform.

Before we jump into that, I want to quickly plug our development team’s prowess with building customized B2B solutions.

Usually, building one of these solutions can easily take 3 to 6 months to go live for a B2B business.

Our B2B extension takes care of the problem. Forget long, expensive lead times. This solution is customizable out-of-the-box, so you can start seeing the results you want right away.

If you're interested in this kind of solution for your brand, make sure tocontact us, so we can help you research what platform is the best for your brand as this video is more generalized

Recently, Gartner once again recognized Adobe for beating other well-known companies for the top spot on their “Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce.”

Gartner’s entire report is worth reading, but in this article, I just want to highlight why Adobe Commerce has done so much for the company’s already-impressive reputation in recent years.

Here are 10 reasons Commerce is so popular with B2B companies.

The first reason is that Adobe Commerce is completelyopen source, which is one of the biggest features for any company, whether they’re B2B or not.

Being an open-source platform means you can change any kind of code you want. This will give you complete flexibility and control, especially when you compare it to other popular platforms, likeShopify orBigCommerce.

Look, those are still great platforms, but as they’re hosted, you don't get access to all their code. You can't change everything on them that you may want, which means – at some point – you’ll have to settle for certain limitations. You won’t be able to completely customize your eCommerce website so it’s 100% unique to your business.

So, if your business is in an industry where certain customizations would become a profitable competitive edge, Adobe Commerce is easy to recommend.

Another major advantage that Adobe Commerce has over other platforms is that it can handle multiple stores through a single admin panel.

This feature can be utilized in a number of very impressive ways.

For one thing, say your B2B business also wants to sell to B2C customers. This will be much easier to do if you have a retail version of your website that’s designed specifically for the unique needs of B2C customers.

Obviously, you don’t want to neglect your valuable B2B buyers, though.

Fortunately, with Magento Commerce, you can operate two different sites through one admin panel. Log into the same platform to see all your cells and how they’re doing at the same time. View all of your customers. Manage all of your products.

This doesn’t just make everything a lot easier.

Because you can stay logged into the same system to manage multiple storefronts, you’ll save a ton of time, as well.

The other reason this is such a huge advantage is because you can use it to manage multiple brands, too.

So, if you're a manufacturer who could benefit from having a lot ofB2C or B2B versions of your site – once again – you only need one admin panel to manage all of these elements. Trying to do that through multiple panels would be too time-consuming and expensive.

And the third reason why this feature is so popular amongst eCommerce companies is because of the need for international sales.

If you want to sell your products to customers in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, and France, you’ll see much better results if you have an eCommerce site for each of them.

Among other things, this means you can offer different payment methods, different languages, and even different branding depending on what will work best for your business.

For many businesses, that’s reason enough to invest in Adobe Commerce, but the fact that you can manage those different versions from one admin panel is what really makes this great feature a no-brainer.

The next thing that Adobe Commerce does so well compared to other platforms is handling complex products.

Right out of the box, you can rely on it to handle:

•        Simple Products
•        Configurable Products
•        Bundled Products

I could probably write a whole post about all the different ways you can leverage this feature, but if you’re a manufacturer, the big takeaway is that, out-of-the-box, you can support as many configurations as you want from your website with Adobe Commerce.

You don’t need to limit yourself in terms of what you’re able to sell from your site.

You also don’t need to worry that trying to list complex projects will involve cutting corners that will ultimately hurt your conversions.

The fourth reason to love Adobe Commerce is how easily it will allow you to register companies as B2B buyers. This includes companies that apply to be part of your B2B wholesale system.

Adobe Commerce comes ready for businesses that want to set up these kinds of registration portals to upgrade improve their wholesale registrations and, thus, their profits.

With this platform, you’ll have everything you need, from creating that portal to adding the form to approving the provided credentials.

The fifth thing that Adobe Commerce has over a lot of other eCommerce platforms out there is that it allows you to register employees and companies and to give them different roles.

So, for example, you register managers who then own the approval process for large orders.

You can also allow your employees to request approval for roles they need to do their jobs.

This feature is similar to what Amazon allows, where a customer can request, “hey I need to buy this large order” and then that order goes to a manager for approval.

You can have sales roles, so that they can register companies.

They can also have their own reports for their sales commissions and then you can even have organizational groups under this, as well.

This level of organization will make it easier to effectively manage your wholesalers and give them different permissions, so that they can have whatever approval processes make sense for placing large orders with your company.

The sixth Adobe Commerce feature I want to highlight is really amazing.

It’srequisition lists.

This feature is very similar to the way a wish list works, but where they differ is extremely important. It’s yet another way Adobe Commerce has helped B2B companies multiply their revenues.

Both lists comprise all kinds of products a buyer wants.

But with a wish list, those products are deleted once the buyer orders them.

With a requisition list, the products stay on that list. This way, when it’s time to reorder, your wholesale buyer doesn’t need to waste time starting from scratch or risking forgetting important items.

A requisition list means that your eCommerce company can offer the most valuable buyers – wholesalers – greater convenience and assurance of their purchase.

For you, this means a greater conversion rate, more repeat business, and increased average order values (AOVs).

The seventh big feature that makes Adobe Commerce stand out is its option to easily request a quote.

In short, custom pricing is common practice among B2B companies that sell to wholesalers.

If you have a customer who regularly makes large purchases – or you believe has the potential to – offering them a quote at a discounted rate is a smart way to keep their business for years to come.

At the same time, you wouldn’t want to offer a blanket discount for all wholesalers. Someone who orders 10,000 items should probably get a different quote than someone who only orders 100.

With Adobe Commerce’s request-a-quote feature, you don’t have to worry about these kinds of blanket quotes. Your wholesalers can request a quote and it will be immediately sent to your administrator panel and your team will receive a notification.

At that point, your team can approve the request for a custom quote or offer different terms instead. The request-a-quote feature ensures that the customer can try to negotiate a counteroffer, too.

Allowing for this kind of back-and-forth makes it possible to lock in more wholesale business at prices that keep everyone happy.

Speaking of keeping everyone happy, let’s talk about CSV files and why they make such a big difference for B2B companies that use Adobe Commerce.

Larger wholesalers may easily purchase thousands of products at a time.

And youcouldforce them to order that many products one-by-one.

Or you could make it easy.

You could let them upload a CSV file to your system or even automate the simple step to make it even easier still.

The CSV file tells you what they want and in what quantities.

This level of convenience is always a huge plus for eCommerce companies and their B2B buyers, many of whom may be ordering when their stock is suddenly unexpectedly low. When time is of the essence, they’re just a simple CSV file away from placing massive orders.

The ninth major B2B solution Adobe Commerce offers is the option to set different payment methods for different customers based on the way you want to group them.

If you have wholesale customers from different countries all over the world, it would make sense to support payment options based on their location. Many companies also want to extendNet 30 credit lines to some of their wholesalers so they can make greater purchases.

Whatever the case, right out of the box, Adobe Commerce supports a wide range of payment options for locking in the most amount of business across all of your customer segments.

Finally, the 10th feature that Adobe Commerce has is the ability to manage your sales representatives, including setting their commission rates.

In fact, you can actually automate much of the process. So, even if you have sales reps working across multiple accounts and through multiple commission structures, Adobe Commerce makes it effortless to pull the amount their owed every payment period.

Now that we've talked about some core B2B features that come with Adobe Commerce, let's talk a little bit about our ownMagento B2B extension.

We've packed this extension full of powerful features, so I won't go through all of them here, but there are a number I’d like to quickly point out.

In a nutshell, Magento Commerce’s core features are focused more on the backend, so the frontend is still going to be your basic eCommerce theme layout.

That’s why we prioritized frontend functionality with our Magento B2B extension – to optimize the experience your B2B customers have when shopping on your site.

This extension makes it as easy as possible for these valuable customers to bypass your B2C storefront and go right to an exclusive section that caters to their unique B2B needs.

The result?

•        More conversions
•        Better AOVs
•        Record-breaking profits

Here are just six of the many ways our Magento B2B extension gets this done.

Below is what Magento looks like installed out of the box. This is the luma theme which is the basic theme that you're going to get when you install Magento.

As you can probably tell, this theme doesn’t offer a lot of customization.

So, one area we targeted for improvement was the actual sign-in page for your B2B portal. By using our extension, a customer who clicks to sign in will be taken to a customized login page that reflects your company’s unique branding.

This is a great way to make a professional first impression with wholesalers who visit your site.

Speaking of that all-important first impression, we designed our extension to make it as easy as possible for companies to convert new B2B wholesalers – creating brand-new sources of valuable revenue.

That’s why we added these user-friendly registration forms that you can – once again – customize with all the fields you need a business to fill out before you can begin supporting them as a wholesaler.

Common examples include:

•        Tax ID
•        How long they’ve been in business
•        Their company’s address
•        The size of their business
•        Their estimated amount of orders

Once the form is complete, our extension will automatically notify your team of the good news.

At that point, you can review the new wholesaler’s information and decide if the applicant fits all of your requirements.

Should you approve of them, our extension will automatically send them a notification email with whatever you decide the message should beandgive them access to your B2B store.

We’re really proud of how effective our extension is at securing those wholesaler sign-ups.

Butacquiring those accounts is only the first step toward generating reoccurring wholesale revenue for your business.

Where a lot of B2B companies struggle with their online stores is that traditional B2C interfaces just aren’t up-to-the-task of serving wholesale buyers – most of whom need to buy hundreds of products at once.

Forcing these kinds of buyers to find the time to go through your entire inventory and click 100+ products one-by-one will eventually force them to look elsewhere for these items.

With our extension’s B2B configuration, your wholesale buyers can do a quick search of your entire catalog and quickly add the products they need – in the quantity they want – to their orders.

As they do this, they can watch the bar at the bottom of the page fill up, adding to their total in real-time with every new product added.

Even after you’ve optimized those initial wholesale-buying steps with more B2B-friendly elements, our extension will still give youA LOTmore options for converting new business and increasing AOVs.

Again, I could easily spend another 10,000 words explaineverything this extension can do for your B2B site, so I’ll just quickly go over a handful of the more popular options.

First, there’s the “View All” product tab.

This is a very important tab, because it will let your buyer view your entire online catalog and, from there, they can quickly search by product name or SKU and see if they're available in the prices they want.

The other really cool thing about this layout is that it makes it easy for your customers to see different variations of the products they’re interested in.

We built this feature with efficiency in mind, so that your wholesalers can quickly log into your B2B store and add the items they want to their cart without having to do a whole bunch of extra steps that may get in the way of conversions.

Now, let’s say a wholesaler is thinking about purchasing an item they’ve never bought before.

Well, now they can quickly click on the product to immediately gain a quick view of the product information, see a larger image of it, and then decide if they want to buy it.

But that’s not all.

You can also go into your administrative panel and add in whatever columns you need to display any other attributes your customers may show interest in for that product.

Your wholesalers can then apply filters to any of those columns to only see the types of products they’re interested in buying.

This is a very real example of how you can improve user experience in a way that will directly impact conversions and revenue.

Alright, so once your B2B store’s fantastic user experience has convinced a wholesaler to add multiple items to their cart, they can either proceed to check out or request a quote for their order. And, again, that will then go to your administrative panel for your salespeople to review and decide what kind of price they’d like to offer.

Of course, the great thing about wholesalers – and the reason you usually give them custom quotes – is because they tend to buy in bulk.

Still, we wanted to make this even easier for our B2B users.

That’s why we’ll let your customers place these larger orders by uploading a simple CSV file. This makes it more convenient for users, but it also means it’s much easier to order larger quantities on a regular basis.

If they want, these customers can download a sample file to see the type of formatting required or they can just go right ahead and upload a file to quickly place their order.

Wholesalers can also take a look at their previously ordered products, which is just one more way we’ve made it as easy as possible for these valuable customers to quickly and effortlessly place large orders.

The last Advanced Shopping feature is one I’m really proud of because I know it solves a problem that can otherwise get in the way of a great B2B wholesale situation.

Use our Download Center to storeALLof the marketing essentials your wholesalers and their vendors need to sell your products.

When a buyer clicks on your Download Center, they’ll be able to see and download all the different types of media you have available for each product.

While we designed this feature to answer B2B sellers’ demands for product files, the Download Center can be used for brand logos, materials for their storefronts, and much more – whatever it takes to increase sales.

Moving on to another great feature for your wholesalers is the ability to give their employees access to this portion of your website.

This way, they don’t have to share their credentials – and privileges – with another employee when they want help placing orders. Let them decide who should have that capability, so another employee – or a dozen or a hundred – can make purchases whenever they like.

Lastly, another really cool feature that we built into this B2B Adobe Commerce extension is that we can let you, the business owner, allow your own sales reps access to the wholesaler side.

This is a really big deal because it means your sales reps can assist their wholesale accounts by adding the items these buyers want to their carts on their behalf. At that point, the buyer can either check out on their own or – if they’d prefer – just approve the order.

Either way, this is just one more way our extension eliminates the kinds of bottlenecks that can stand between your business and greater conversions.

The fact that this will also make your B2B customers happier – who doesn’t love having others do the work for them? – is a nice big plus, too.

As you can see, Adobe Commerce is chock-full of features that make it a revenue force-multiplier for B2B companies. There’sa ton you can do with it right out-of-the-box to customize it and give your company a huge leg up on the competition.

And for an even greater advantage, check out our Magento B2B extension.

As far as the rest of your site goes, if you’d like assistance with maintenance, development, or marketing, ourMagento agency is here to help.

At IWD, we like to think of ourselves as the wedding coordinators of eCommerce, having built a large network over the past 12 years.

So, if anything you need falls outside our list of services, we know where to go for the right solutions or can even connect you with people who can solve any problems you’re having.

Contact us today to find out more about the many ways our agency can help grow your business.