Why Magento Commerce’s B2B Features Are Great for Your Business
Adobe has been one of the biggest names in eCommerce for decades now.
As recently as 2020, Gartner even identified Adobe above all of its competitors for its “ability to execute” and its “completeness of vision.” This was the second year Gartner awarded Adobe this honor.
While there are a number of factors that have made Adobe such a successful company, their acquisition of Magento in 2018 has certainly played a role.
In fact, Gartner cited the popular eCommerce platform in its most recent report saying, “[Adobe’s] commerce product, Magento Commerce, offers a single-tenant commerce platform, as well as multitenant distributed order management and commerce analytics.”
Of course, Gartner’s not the only one who loves Adobe. At IWD, we’ve been using their Magento Commerce platform to build powerful B2B companies for 10+ years thanks to its many amazing features.
Let’s look at seven of my favorite.
7 Magento Commerce B2B Features That Are Great for B2B Companies
In 2021, Adobe formally announced that it was officially consolidating "Magento Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud to the single brand of Adobe Commerce."
But whether you call it Adobe Commerce or still refer to it as Magento, there are seven reasons this platform will always be popular with B2B companies.
1. Open Source – Completely Customize Your eCommerce Site
One of the biggest of these reasons is how incredibly customizable it is. Just about anything you need your website to do to create the results you want is possible with this powerful platform. There literally isn’t a single aspect of a Magento site that the owner can’t change (of course, it helps to hire experienced Magento developers).
This is vital for B2B businesses as their customers’ buying behaviors tend to be unique to their industries. Someone who wants to buy office supplies for their company is going to have different expectations for a website than someone who needs to buy parts for their construction business.
With Magento Commerce, you can create the perfect experience for your specific market, so you maximize engagement and conversions.
Connect to Your Essential Preexisting Systems
Just because you’re looking for a brand-new eCommerce platform, that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to scrap every piece of your current online presence.
For example, many of our Magento clients wanted to migrate from another platformbutkeep the ERPs, CSMs, PIMs, or POSs they loved.
This isn’t a problem when you build your site on Magento Commerce. You can connect this eCommerce platform with any of these essential eCommerce systems, so you upgrade what needs improving but keep what’s been working.
2. Handle Multiple Stores Through a Single Admin Panel
There are a number of reasons you may want multiple storefronts for your company. Maybe your company sells to both B2B and B2C customers, which may require different storefronts for each market.
Maybe you sell across different countries or accept different currencies.
Whatever the case, trying to effectively accommodate these aspects of your market can be nearly impossible with only one storefront. Attempting to do so can involve all kinds of costly workarounds and, even then, you may not get a site that speaks to every segment of your market.
The result: a lot of money left on the table.
But Magento makes it simple to operate as many storefronts as you need from just one admin panel. You can manage everything from your inventory to orders to customer service conversations all from one place even if it’s across multiple stores serving different markets.
3. Handle Complex Product Configurations
Another important facet of selling products to B2B clients is ensuring that those products are configurable.
Magento makes it incredibly easy to set up your products this way.
Even better, the platform makes it just as easy for your customers to configure products however they see fit.
For example, say your B2B company sells commercial truck tires. You could have an individual product page for each and every single one of them, but that may make it difficult for your customers to find what they’re looking for. This poor user experience will always hurt your site’s conversion rate.
A better approach would be to have one product page for each specific type of tire that customers can configure (perhaps by size, width, tread, etc.) to pick the exact version they need for their vehicles.
No matter how many ways there are to customize your products, Magento lets you offer every option from just one page. Not only does this make it easier for your customers to find the exact product they want (so they’re more likely to convert), but this is also much better for making your product pages SEO-friendly – instead of having numerous, similar versions competing against one another for the same spot in Google.
4. Register & Create Company Accounts
As B2B companies have very different customers than their B2C counterparts, they need very different ways to engage with these buyers.
The most successful B2B businesses have websites that give their customers specific portals for placing orders.
Magento Commerce does this by allowing individuals to create accounts for their companies and then manage permissions on an employee level.
For example, the purchasing manager at a company can give their reps access to this portal and approval to add the items they need to the company’s cart. But, before they can complete their checkout, Magento Commerce would require approval from that purchasing manager.
Utilizing this kind of setup on your B2B site is one of the easiest ways to quickly improve your conversion rate. Purchasing managers no longer need to find time to do all of the shopping their business requires. They can delegate this task to other employees without worrying about their budget being misused. All they have to do is review the final shopping list and click “buy.”
5. Order in Bulk by Using Requisition Lists
Another big difference between B2B and B2C customers is that the former often need to order items in bulk. Many B2B companies have to do so on a regular basis.
And this is where a lot of B2B websites drop the ball. Every time a shopper needs to make one of these bulk purchases, they have to go through the entire process of navigating through the site to find all of the items they want.
This approach isn’t just time-consuming. Even purchasing managers can make mistakes when they have to go through an entire shopping list every single time they want to replenish their inventories.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Your company can use Magento Commerce to make it as easy as possible for purchasing managers to regularly buy large quantities through your website.
With the platform’s Requisition List, your B2B customers can simply create lists of products they regularly buy and store them in their customer accounts.
Unlike a traditional wish list, though, these items won’t disappear from their Requisition List once they order them. They’ll remain on that list so the customer can order them again and again.
Furthermore, customers can even create multiple lists based on common categories like:
- Buyers
- Vendors
- Teams
Or whatever other categories matter to them the most. Magento Commerce allows them to create the Requisition lists that will make it easiest for them to order again and again.
6. Offer Custom Quotes
Negotiating prices is common practice in B2B industries and yet most B2B companies’ websites don’t make it easy for buyers to reach out for a custom quote – even the ones that have buyer portals. On most B2B sites, it’s up to the buyer to (hopefully) contact the company and initiate the conversation about getting a custom price.
You’ll stand a much better chance of locking in greater conversions if you useMagento Commerce’s Custom Quotes feature. It will allow any authorized buyers to request to negotiate the price of your products.
Then, Magento’s Quotes grid records all communication between your company and your B2B buyers. You can also use the platform’s standard workplace controls to filter the list, change the layout of your columns, save the views you like best, and export data.
The easier you make it for your customers to negotiate prices, the easier it will be to convert them. And nothing makes both of these things easier than Magento Commerce.
7. Offer Customers Credit
Speaking of accommodating your B2B customers in order to boost conversions,offering them lines of credit means higher conversion rates, greater average order values, and, ultimately, more profit.
With Magento Commerce, you can offer customers company credit through their portal so they can purchase the products they neednowbut pay for them later.
You’ll be able to completely manage this credit line, including the customer’s limit. If you want, you can even decide to let specific customers exceed that credit limit.
And if any of your customers ever have an outstanding balance, Magento will immediately notify the store administrator right in the Admin panel.
How to Get Even More from Magento Commerce’s B2B Features for Your Company
As you can see, I’m a huge fan of how much Magento Commerce has to offer B2B companies.
However, I’ve also spent two decades working in eCommerce, so I know that there are a number of other ways you can improve your B2B company’s online presence even more.
That’s why I created our own B2B extension for Magento Commerce. If you want to give your company’s website a competitive edge over the rest of your market, here are four advantages our extension will give you.
1. A Specific Hub Just for Your Wholesale Customers
Earlier, I touched on how important it is to offer bulk ordering to your B2B customers.
With our popular Magento extension, you can actually take this important offering several steps further.
Once wholesale customers log into your Magento site, our extension will bring them to a customizable B2B dashboard that offers multiple ordering workflows, including:
- File Upload
- Previously Order Products
- Quick Order
- View All Products
- View Current Cart
With our customized ordering tables, your wholesalers will find the products they want lightning-fast. Instead of sorting through page after page of your inventory through the front-end of your site, B2B customers can use a product matrix to quickly filter your entire inventory to find the products they came for.
2. Easy Bulk Ordering for Wholesale Customers
While I mentioned that Magento supports bulk ordering for your B2B customers, I thought there was still room for improvement when working with our eCommerce clients.
So, my team and I added specific product matrices for wholesale customers to our Magento extension.
They will help your company sell even more to these valuable customers in two very important ways.
First, our extension will allow them to search your entire inventory using any attributes you want to offer. For example, if you sell clothing, maybe your customers would appreciate being able to search your products by materials. Magento doesn’t support this option, but it’s not a problem when you use our B2B extension.
Second, it will let your customers quickly configure any products they want to the exact specifications they need and then order those specific configured products in bulk, too.
As the customer adds products to their cart, they’ll see it automatically update – with the price – in their footer, so you don’t have to worry that sticker shop will lead to a bloated abandonment rate.
3. Manage Payment and Shipping Methods
No detail is too small when it comes to optimizing your B2B company’s selling process.
So, even though Magento Commerce will give you control over your shoppers’ options for payment methods, we give you even more control by letting you decide which shipping methods your wholesale customers can choose.
Then, with our “Customer Group Pricing” feature, you can easily assign pricing groups to your customer base – giving you much greater control over the specifics of your B2B sales process.
4. Make It Easy for Buyers to Market Your Products
By now, you can probably see how our B2B extension has helped so many companies increase their sales.
But that’s not good enough to maintain long-term profitability as a B2B business if you have customers who are resellers.
For these types of B2B customers, it’ll make all the difference if you make it as easy as possible for them to market the products they’re buying from you.
That’s why our B2B extension includes a Download Center for storing all of your products’ marketing assets. This way, when a customer buys a product, they can quickly access anything they need to quickly set up their product pages and start marketing – and selling – your items ASAP.
Reach Your Company’s Potential with Magento Commerce’s B2B Features
Switching to a brand-new eCommerce platform is a big decision, but if your business is a B2B enterprise, it’s going to be hard to reach your full potential without the power of Magento.
And when you think of all the ways our extension can make this powerful platform even better, well, we like to think the choice becomes an easy one.
Nonetheless, if you’re still on the fence, feel free to contact us to speak with one of our eCommerce experts. We can walk you through the cost of Magento, its long list of capabilities, and even show you examples of what it’s done for some of our clients.