B2B online retail is expected to grow to twice the size of the B2C eCommerce market by 2020, with revenues forecasted to reach $6.7 trillion. Frost & Sullivan have projected that worldwide B2B eCommerce will cross the $12 trillion sales mark by 2020, which is an 8.11% annual growth rate from 2015’s $5.5. Trillion.
Magento has been the platform of choice for B2C ecommerce sites for the past 10 (or so) years. With more businesses now expecting an online experience that mirrors the B2C market, it is more important than ever to make sure your website is up to scratch and can seamlessly deliver. Magento seems like the logical choice as it not only already has the functionality and the many years of consumer experience to back it up, it also has dedicated features tailored to the B2B market.
Magento offers, as standard, varying levels of support to different accounts holders. Therefore, you’ll be able to create certain customer groups who will then have access to different levels of support, whether this is a specific price plan, payment structure, or a level of service that you may offer. You can pretty much create dynamic roles and permissions for all scenarios which means your customers will know exactly what to expect and that the services provided on your website are specific to them and their needs.
Your business may be both B2B and B2C and Magento can help you to manage both side by side. Magento allows you to enable or disable specific products per store, therefore if your B2B offers are different from the B2C ones you can easily manage this. As mentioned above, you can personalise pricing for the all of the accounts that you have. So if you have a particular client that gets 70% off all prices than you can easily set this up, just for them. All your customer will need to do is login and they will see the prices that are just for them.
The average B2C customer often reorders the products they ordered from several weeks ago. Offering an option for your customer to review old orders and then reorder them will save your customer time as well as making it a less painful experience to reorder (no one wants to trawl through your site adding various items one by one to their basket!). Best of all, this is another standard feature of Magento!
Magento has a wealth of integrations which allows B2B users to extend the power of the platform beyond just what it offers on its own. The seamless integration with your ERP, CRM and API’s is what makes Magento the ideal platform. Here is a short list of some of the most popular modules available:
Magento offers B2B websites the flexibility to build whatever is needed. If your business has a particular requirement that hasn’t been mentioned above then get in touch, we’d love to discuss how we can help your website to perform in a way that suits your business needs.
3 Min Read
Published: 13 June 2019
Mat is the founder here at Actuate. His role focuses on strategy, culture, looking after our clients and every now and then getting stuck in with coding.
Find out how we can help
01244 911360
[javascript protected email address]
Enquire Online