B2B2C or B2M (Business to Many), B2E (Business to Everyone) is a popular business model that targets various customer groups in the market. Magento B2B2C is no exception.
Nowadays, a business that goes to B2B2C is mainly a B2B business expanding to the B2C market to attract new customers and raise revenue. However, there are many cases in which B2C companies want to join the wholesale market, approach B2B customers, and update the stores to higher levels for wholesalers. You may be wondering “What is B2B2C?”.
In this article, let’s together find out more about Magento B2B2C Ecommerce, B2B2C definition (b2b and b2c websites), and how to move to Magento B2B2C with the most cost-saving solution.
For those planning to build a B2B2C website, we do offer web development services for you. Don’t hesitate to consult us for free here >>>
What is B2B2C Ecommerce?
Table of Contents
To get started, let’s go for B2B2C Commerce in the most general.
B2B2C Ecommerce takes place when a company provides goods for both business and end-consumers on B2B and B2C websites.
Let’s make an intense analysis for two cases when it comes to B2B2C ecommerce business:
- an online B2B business needs to seek more chances with consumers; hence, expand the business to B2C.
- a B2C online store aims to reach wholesalers for more massive order amounts, long-lasting relationships, and build a concrete basement for further development.
These two cases are considered the most trends in B2M Ecommerce to expand the target market and increase revenue from more customers.
Magento B2B2C Ecommerce
Magento Ecommerce platform initially meets all requirements for every business that is planning to expand into broader market and business model levels. Even if you are running a B2B, B2C, or B2M business, Magento can quickly adapt to your specific demands with diverse functions as well as its scalability.
In case you have the intention of moving from B2C to B2B2C, Magento B2B2C can do it well, especially Magento Commerce edition. This Commerce is equipped with B2B modules to provide users with crucial functions to operate a wholesale business and increase the B2B shopping experience in only one website.
Moreover, Magento is more favorable with the high scalability to enable users to customize functions freely compared to other platforms. In addition, various extensions and services on the marketplace are remarkable advantages that make Magento fit for B2M e-commerce than other B2B e-commerce platforms.
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Challenges to operating Magento B2B B2C on a website
Running a Magento B2C business seems to be less complicated than a B2B and B2C website, as we already know. With the only one targeting consumers as end-users, it is easier to catch their shopping habits.
Thus, the B2C websites’ necessary functionality becomes simpler than B2B features that are born to handle the long purchase process of wholesale customers.
Even if you are a beginner who plans to build a Magento B2B2C website or move from B2C to B2B2C, you must have had certain obstacles when implementing the update.
Let’s take a look at the following challenges to get a well-prepared strategy and limit possible risks:
Deal with various customer groups
Moving to Magento B2B2C requires you to control both consumers and wholesalers in a website. The B2B2C business must create a long-term relationship with these two target customers and offer different strategies to meet specific characteristics. Hence, they cannot treat both the same because B2B and B2C prospects are naturally different based on behavior, demands, and purchase decisions.
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Once you target more than one customer group on the same website, it is required to create a different shopping experience that adapts for each buyer type.
Some things can be listed as:
- One registration form for consumers and another one for wholesalers: you had better collect more information from wholesale customers than consumers.
- Price personalization: due to particular characteristics of wholesale business, a Magento B2B2C cannot assign a similar pricing of consumers for wholesale customers. B2B buyers need to get better pricing and additional benefits for their large number of ordered products and the long-term business relationship.
B2B function equipment
A B2C website that provides products for consumers may not include enough B2B functionalities for doing the wholesale business.
Thus, to operate a Magento B2B B2C most effectively, store owners must complement Magento B2B functions to the website so that the shopping experience and business performance become smooth and improved.
If you are using the Magento Commerce edition, it is quite convenient to install a bunch of B2B modules supported by the default Commerce.
In case your website is built on Magento Open Source edition, you need to acquire some Magento B2B extensions, even a complete solution or separate modules to resolve some specific requirements.
Costs
If you are operating a B2C website, costs may be an issue that doesn’t matter. It is more cost-effective to add some B2B functions to the existing websites.
But the big problem is you haven’t had any websites and want to create a Magento B2B2C one from scratch.
Total costs become your main obstacle and require you to build a complete development plan carefully. You not only create features for consumers and wholesalers but also concentrate on the shopping experience of each customer group on only one website.
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A quick solution for Magento 2 B2B2C
If you are using Magento Open Source and desire to embrace B2B features to your B2C website with the most economical costs, Magento 2 B2B extension package is the ideal solution to cover the whole customer purchase journey from A to Z.
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The wholesale solution brings more must-have B2B features for a B2C website, including:
Access restrictions
For a B2C website, every customer has the right to access any page for a user-friendly shopping experience. However, B2B online business tells another story due to their different pricing and policies from individual consumers.
When you combine B2C and B2B business in a unified website, you had better control over B2C customer access to specific pages available for wholesalers.
This segmentation gives you a hand to provide each customer group with a separate user experience, offer wholesalers certain pricing and strategies that benefit more than individual consumers.
With Magento 2 B2B extension package, we promise to optimize access restrictions by hiding specific products, categories, or CMS pages from other customers who are not wholesalers.
B2B customers need to login to verify accounts and then view the content of the navigated pages.
Of course, other retailers or consumers can still purchase on the website as long as they don’t visit pages for wholesale customers only.
With default Magento 2 – especially Open Source edition, you cannot get this functionality for your B2B online websites. It is a must to ask for help from third-party extensions to limit access for consumers.
But don’t worry anymore! Our Magento 2 B2B module covers the full feature for your B2B2C website with these two plugins: Force Login and Category Permission.
Corporate account management
It is improper that you let both wholesaler and consumers register their accounts on only one sign-up form.
Why does this issue matter?
The reason is you must require as much detailed information from B2B customers as possible. If a consumer needs to provide simple data (name and email) for new account registration, you should ask B2B prospects more, including VAT, job title, company profile, and so on.
This information helps validate your customers, understand their business, and build further intense sales strategies in the future.
In terms of Magento B2B2C business, our solution provides B2C store owners with separate registration forms with B2B-driven extra fields, and even unlimited customer attributes to collect more and more customer data for portrait customer persona.
Furthermore, these accounts created from this B2B registration form are not regular accounts; they can be B2B accounts or company accounts depending on your approval.
However, doing wholesale business should position customers as Company accounts to offer them roles and multiple sub-users for better purchase management.
The reason is that no wholesale business just permits one person to make purchase decisions, especially when they often buy a large number of various goods.
Hence, assigning B2B accounts as Company accounts enables wholesalers to share workloads by sub-users with suitable roles to take responsibility for certain tasks.
One thing may be useful for every B2C business desiring for B2B expansion: sales representative.
If your B2C online website is acquiring third-party systems to support customers (Livechat, helpdesk, etc.) constantly, B2B business needs to equip a more professional Sales rep team. They consult customers in the long purchase process and provide a high individualization experience on your website.
B2B and B2C customers distinguish themselves at the complexion of the decision-making and purchase journey.
If B2C buyers can go to the end of a deal even without any support or consultation from the salesman, you should perform more actions for B2B. Sales rep teams are one of the wisest sales strategies for wholesale businesses to target customers’ individual demands and contribute to making their decision-making more quickly than ever.
Secret pricing and price negotiation
When operating a B2C online business, you may ignore these two issues because there is no special reason for hiding prices and requesting customers to negotiate prices with us.
On the contrary, once you decide to cover both B2B markets, it is a must to take into consideration price concerns.
As you know, a highlighted characteristic of B2B business is pricing personalization and bargain for wholesale customers.
Why do these issues matter for B2B ecommerce?
Wholesale customers often place many orders in large quantities; hence, pricing is quite different from consumers’ regular prices. Due to the order size and frequency, they try to request a better product price (more reasonable) by bargaining with store owners.
Thus, this case puts B2B Ecommerce store owners to provide customers with a specialized quotation form to submit the quote requests conveniently.
With our B2B extension, you can insert the Add to Quote buttons to product and category pages along with the Add to Cart buttons.
Check the Quotation process for clarifying how store owners and buyers perform as below:
Also, one function that segments B2B and B2C customer shopping experience is Hide price – secret pricing strategies for wholesale business only.
It is essential to reveal all product prices on pages for consumers to purchase quickly.
However, as mentioned above, wholesale customers can be treated differently from consumers due to specific characteristics of order size and frequency. As a result, you should limit price exposure for B2C purchasers to protect separated pricing benefits for wholesalers.
Once you are selling for both consumers and wholesalers, it would be better to hide the wholesale products and categories from consumers and request wholesalers to contact or login for price display. You can deliver better pricing for B2B buyers and then convert into sales more effectively with the sales rep team’s help when they contact your store to get prices.
Furthermore, you are allowed to customize pricing for different customer groups or even per customer. This flexible strategy is quite favorable for B2B2C Ecommerce businesses when it helps to provide specific product prices for each target customer.
Let’s take a look at the following example:
Each custom group purchases products at different prices, especially wholesale, and consumers can benefit from this unique strategy.
Order placement
B2B customers are frequent purchasers – they buy products periodically with a large number of items in an order. Hence, it is recommended that you should optimize the order placement for wholesale customers: let them order more quickly than ever!
The fast order placement is indispensable for both B2B and B2C online stores when it enhances the shopping experience and increases customer satisfaction.
For B2B business, this new order process helps wholesalers process their purchases more quickly and save a considerable amount of time when they don’t need to navigate each product page.
There are some methods of quick ordering that this Magento 2 B2B extension supports:
- Order multiple products via a form or add multiple SKUs at once.
- Upload a CSV file to purchase in the blink of an eye.
- Add multiple products to cart from product list pages (Category page, search result pages, etc.) and the reorder page.
In case B2B2C websites are using configurable products, this solution also optimizes the ordering process by displaying all children products in a grid table and allowing customers to add multiple chill items to cart.
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What’s more? Our Magento 2 B2B extension brings other handy functionality specializing for the wholesale business:
- Enclose product attachments with the product pages to provide customers with more information such as user manuals, size charts,…
- Let customers add wishlists to save their favorite products and purchase later without taking time to search again.
- Require wholesalers to purchase a minimum order about to checkout.
Checkout personalization
When you plan to move your B2C business to B2B2C, it is recommended to separate checkout experience for each customer group.
B2B customers would love to make payment via some specific methods which cannot be used for consumers. The shipping methods tell the same stories. Due to a large number of products, wholesalers may prefer big carriers to small shipping providers.
Hence, the B2B solution also helps Magento B2B2C business owners to customize shipping and payment methods per customer group. You can set up specific methods per B2B and B2C to improve the checkout experience on a unified website.
Furthermore, you can freely create unlimited custom shipping methods for your wholesale buyers, depending on your current situation and even customer requests.
Customer retention
As mentioned above, B2B business must build a long-term relationship with purchasers (companies as well). Thus, it forces B2B and B2C websites to seek optimized solutions for keeping customers coming back next time, even in the case of refunds.
This Magento 2 B2B extension package enables store owners to refund buyers by store credit to spend these credits on future purchases.
You not only keep money stay on the website but also retain customer engagement and closely tight them with your business.
To understand how these mentioned functions are performing on the real website, please check this product video demo:
Or let’s schedule a demo with us, and our team will make a direct discussion about the solution for you.
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Conclusion
Moving from B2C to Magento B2B2C is never a simple task! Even you are operating a website or haven’t built your own B2B2C store, there are a lot of things to be prepared for smooth website performance. Equipping a Magento B2B solution or hiring an agency to implement B2B development from scratch should be carefully considered to meet your requirements.
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