Magento – Can it be Geared for B2B Commerce?

One can’t overstate the fact that Magento eCommerce has brought transformational changes in the way B2C businesses operated. The companies with the B2C model have been able to reach a much larger band of audience owing to the web platform that makes it easier for them to broadcast their services and products to a whole new array of consumers.

Now, Magento needs to spread its wings. While everything looks great for the B2C model, Magento needs to branch out to the B2B model to help out the companies that have clients who are much more tech-savvy, and have a relatively astronomical expectation from the services they have invested in. Most definitely, there are oversights that you can get away with when you are offering services to end-users, but you are most likely to pay the price for them when it comes to business buying your services. And that’s where the typicality in B2B crawls in. and that’s where we need to ascertain if Magento is indeed a platform that can help you steer clear of those oversights.

Challenges Associated with Magento for B2B:

Much More Customizable & Fully-Functional Store Required for B2B

Your online store made for the general consumers won’t suffice when you need to pitch your services for businesses to buy them. There has to be a much larger investment on your part in resources and your eCommerce website has to be much more dynamic and versatile. You can’t just go with the default features (yes, you already have installed several Magento extensions to let your online store elevate beyond the defaults, but for B2B, they won’t suffice). A Magento store for businesses would require you to hire highly skilled Magento developers who can customize your store in the most professional manner and give you an absolute control over every facet of your website. And this requires quite a big investment.

The Built-in-Quotation Procedure Does Exist with Magento

That’s how businesses deal with each other – a business proposal is put forth, which is followed by a quotation that is negotiated upon. Once the final quote is decided upon and the proposal is accepted, the project starts rolling. Now, with Magento being designed with the B2C model in mind, there is not much to choose for facilitating the process. That said, however, the Cart2Quote module of Magento does manage to address these issue with flair. Install it with your store and try it out.

Assigning Prices in a Client-Specific Manner

While Magento has a lot of flexibility when it comes to assigning specific prices for a category, but when it comes to dealing with businesses, there has to be a system where you can create a pricing architecture that is exclusive to individual clients. Now, such functionality doesn’t exist by default in Magento.

Opportunities Magento Can Create:

All is not a challenge when it comes to using Magento for B2B endeavor. There is much to look forward to:

Seamless Integration with Third Party Tools

The integration capability of Magento with different set of software is a fact well knows, and that’s exactly wheat serves as the perfect platform for our endeavor. The APIs can be leveraged by the developers to connect the various dots between the online store and back-office apps. The ERP environment can also be made use of when it comes to Magento integration and it can help deal with the convoluted Magento workflows that involve a long chain of properties for an approval system.

Enhanced Personalization

The ability of a Magento store to record the customer behaviour, using which it suggests you few products when all you have done is inputted a key is what makes Magento so singularly effective. The segmentation of products makes it easy for the customers to easily locate what they wish to buy, and the same model can give a business a major boost when it is pitching to other business. When your client can easily find what it’s looking for, it doesn’t need to go to shoot an email to you. The product recommendations can be made effortlessly using Magento and that further makes it a go-to platform.

Segmentation of the Product Catalogs

B2B parties need a functionality where they can make their website offer certain group of services to a Customer X, and offer a radically different set of services to the Customer Y. Magento helps them create these unique catalogs without a fuss and thus, they have the greater wherewithal to direct customers to find the products they are looking for in a manner most simplified.

While a B2B firm planning to host an eCommerce platform may have to take some tricky decisions, they also need to prepare themselves with the large costs associated with the transformational changes their infrastructure needs.

This article is written by Danial Wright. He is certified Magento Developer cum blogger. Presently, he is employed with Magentax Ltd, a Custom Magento development company. He loves sharing information rich content about web design and development tips and tricks.