In this article, we will introduce you to 5+ outstanding Magento B2B features, including Magento 2 Quick Order, advanced analytics and more!
The world of eCommerce is expanding more and more every day, and most B2B transactions are moving to online platforms.
Magento is famous as a powerful platform for both B2B and B2C eCommerce websites.
In this article, we will review some outstanding B2B features that make Magento truly great for B2B online stores.
What Is B2B?
Table of Contents
B2B is short for business to business, which is a form of transaction between businesses involving manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers.
Compared to B2C business, there are more difficulties running a B2B business, such as complex orders, optimizing sites for inbound marketing and engaging audiences.
Magento is considered a go-to eCommerce platform for B2B businesses to build a convenient and secure website that meets all the B2B requirements.
5+ Outstanding Magento B2B Features
In this part, we will talk about some outstanding B2B features, including Quick Order extension, account management, security and more!
Account management and catalog permission
Because a B2B user account is used by an entire team or a group of people, the account management is also much more complex than a B2C account.
Understanding this, Magento enables company accounts as a specific feature for B2B buyers.
This feature allows wholesale customers to request an account called admin. Then, they can create sub-accounts with flexible permissions by themselves.
This feature is very helpful for B2B businesses. And below are some major benefits of it.
From the store owners’ view:
- Get to know more clearly about B2B customers
- Manage all B2B customers easily within a grid
- Customize B2B pricing rules and marketing campaigns accordingly
- Grant specific payment and shipping methods per customer group
- Accelerate the B2B ordering process and improve customer experience
- Protect content and assets from unwanted access
From the buyers’ view:
- Assign roles and permissions to make use of human resources
- Track purchase and related data: quotes, orders, wish lists, company credit, etc.
The second security wall to protect your store’s content is “Catalog Permission.” Enabling the Category Permissions feature allows the admin to apply the needed access for each category.
You can add multiple permission rules to each category for different customer groups and store views.
Magento 2 quick order & requisition lists
To quickly ramp up B2B sales, a fast ordering process is way more important than catalog browsing.
First, we want to mention the quick order for Magento 2 feature. This extension can shorten the ordering process for wholesale customers by using their desired products list.
They just need to enter the name or SKU of the product or upload a CSV file that includes the list of products. Then they can add multiple products to a cart with a click.
However, this feature is lacking on default Magento. To take advantage of it, you need to install a third-party extension.
And hereby, we want to recommend to you the best Magento 2 Quick Order extension:
Price: $119
Support policy: Free 1-year support
Quick Order extension by BSS enables your customers to quickly order multiple products without visiting multiple pages.
Not only that it allows customers to search products by names/SKUs, but it also supports AJAX and Elasticsearch to quickly filter what customers are searching. And in case there is only one result matched, it will auto-select that product.
Customers can also order by uploading a CSV file that is filled with order information.
A unique feature of this extension is that it offers two different templates of the quick order form.
- Template 1: customers search for products on each line of the table
- Template 2: customers search for products on one box for the whole form
Both of those templates are designed to optimize the B2B shopping experience. You can choose the template that fits your customers the most.
Quick Order by BSS also preload best-seller or frequently ordered products in the quick order form to help save the searching time of wholesale buyers.
Secondly, store owners can create requisition lists to make it easier for wholesale customers to reorder products based on their intent. Customers can create unlimited requisition lists.
To create requisition lists, customers can click Create New Requisition List in the sidebar of their account and then add products to them.
>>> Find more information about: In-Depth Guide For Magento 2 Quick Order By SKU
Security
Security is one of the most important factors contributing to B2B businesses’ reputation.
Hence, your B2B websites need to have a secure PCI-compliant checkout. It will help you to authorize, deliver and process B2B payments seamlessly.
Luckily, Magento Commerce is PCI certified as a Level 1 Solution provider. So Magento merchants can use Magento’s PCI Attestation of Compliance to aid their PCI certification process.
Besides, the Magento Commerce Cloud architecture provides a highly secure environment through other elements regarding security as:
- Consumer’s browser (using the HTTPs for all pages on the website)
- Content Delivery Network (CDN) & DDoS protection – Fastly
- Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- Payment Gateway
- Virtual Private Cloud
- Penetration testing
- Magento Application
- Encryption
- Read-only File System
- Remote Deployment
- Logging
- Backups
Performance
Unlike B2C businesses, B2B businesses focus on keeping customer loyalty rather than looking for new customers.
Wholesale customers are harder to find, and they bring many times more revenue than individuals. Hence, it is obvious that site performance is an important part of any B2B eCommerce website.
Especially the loading speed.
B2B customers usually want to waste as little time as possible on the ordering process. If your website slows down their ordering process, they will abandon their cart.
Thus, you need to reduce the loading time by doing things like optimizing images and frontend and back-end elements.
Magento marketplace provides many third-party extensions to reduce the website loading time. Additionally, Magento 2 provides some optimizations to reduce page weight and response times, such as:
- Optimizes the assets required to render the page by using minification.
- Maximizes the usage of the browser cache for storing assets
- Improves response time by using asynchronous processing during checkout and cart operations
>>> Read more relate articles: 13+ Magento 2 Quick Order Extensions To Fasten Checkout Process
Purchasing workflow
In the purchasing workflow, we want to talk about the quote request and negotiation feature and postponed payment feature.
Quote request and negotiation
When it comes to B2B sales, price negotiation is a very harsh and sensitive step. So online price management should be taken care of flexibly and wisely.
On the market, there are many Magento extensions to let you hide prices, set up quote requests and price negotiation.
The prices vary by customer group. By hiding the price, your buyers need to take further actions to get discounted rates. Thus, this flexible pricing policy will unleash the customer groups’ purchasing power and promote the connection between sellers and buyers.
Hide price extension allows you to hide the prices of specific products and categories or hide them from selected customer groups.
When customers want to buy your product, they can directly call or leave a quote request for further negotiation. With Magento 2 Request for Quote feature, wholesalers can submit a win-win pricing negotiation through three steps:
- Buyers request a quote
- Seller review the submitted quote and respond
- After receiving the quote response, buyers will convert the quote to cart
Postponed payment
When it comes to B2B sales with high-value orders and long-term partnerships, postponed payments are needed.
With the Magento 2.4 version or later, you can allow wholesale customers to finish their checkout with postponed payments. It is a default function, which means you don’t need to install any extension.
Merchants can monitor customer credit data and specify limits for each account, meaning you can give your trusted buyers more generous credit limits.
Advanced analytics
B2B websites require in-depth and personalized analytic solutions because each customer is unique.
It is crucial to have an advanced analytics solution that allows you to tailor KPI tracking to each customer by individual actions, catalogs, contracts, etc.
With Magento 2.4 or later, you can get in-depth insights from over 25 B2B-focused reports in dashboards.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there is no doubt that Magento is an amazing eCommerce platform. It provides many outstanding B2B features, such as Magento 2 quick order, advanced analytics, etc.
Thanks to those features, it effectively supports the operation of a B2B website and makes it easy to optimize the store.
We hope this blog is helpful and good luck to you!
BSS Commerce is one of the leading Magento extension providers and Magento 2 development services in the world. With experienced and certified Magento developers, we commit to bringing high-quality products and services to optimize your business effectively. Furthermore, we offer FREE Installation – FREE 1-year Support and FREE Lifetime Update for every Magento extension.
CONTACT NOW to let us know your problems. We are willing to support you every time.
