Magento has been an established ecommerce platform for many years and has many strengths, including their B2B functionality. For retailers who are exploring Magento over other platforms, such as Shopify and BigCommerce, it can be challenging to understand which platform would fit their requirements best.
There are specific challenges for retailers who need to meet the growing demand of managing B2B transactions. When it comes to B2B ecommerce, Magento has many benefits that retailers can take advantage of to achieve ecommerce success.
But why is Magento so strong for B2B ecommerce? What key functionality does the platform have for B2B retailers?
#1 – Custom Catalogues & Pricing
With Magento, you can personalise your online experience for each customer by assigning custom catalogue and price lists to your buyers.
You can also customise your platform by offering various payment options for each buyer to maximise sales across invoices, credit cards and alternative payment methods.
#2 – Convenient B2B Reordering
Magento is also strong at offering fast reordering for B2B. You can boost sales with fast and convenient browsing and purchasing options, by allowing B2B buyers to place orders by entering SKUs, uploading CSV files or even choosing items from requisition lists that have been pre-set.
#3 – Quote Management Tools
With the Magento platform, you can take advantage of customer quoting and pricing negotiations that can be entirely managed with both Magento and any external systems you have, using API integrations.
These can be handled with streamlined advanced workflows to help quote responsiveness, customer experience and ultimately, higher conversion rates.
#4 – Account Management
With Magento’s B2B suite of tools, your customers can manage their own company accounts to track quotes, view detailed order history, manage account credit and more. This ultimately reduces the need for a reliance on customer support, with your B2B buyers able to manage their accounts themselves.
#5 – Buyer Roles & Permissions
Along with Magento’s account management, buyers can also assign buyer roles and permissions. Customers can set multiple tiers of buyers, with varying responsibilities including buying power and account management. For B2B buyers, this can improve customer experience by reducing the need for your customers to call you or email you for additional support.
#6 – Advanced Segmentation & Targeting
Magento has advanced segmentation and targeting for retailers, allowing personalised and dynamic ecommerce experiences. This is especially important for B2B brands, where you may have multiple buyer types across roles, verticals and industries, affinity and more.
The ability to create segmented and targeted content for these customers will improve your online experience and improve conversion rates.
#7 – Business Intelligence & Analytics
Magento comments that it is “the only commerce solution that also provides data pipeline, warehouse and visualization capabilities” as part of its unique Business Intelligence tool.
Their out of the box analytics can give Ecommerce Directors unique and valuable insight into their ecommerce performance, which can be especially useful for B2B brands.
Dashboards can be visual and customised, gathering simpler data across average order values, customer lifetime value, retention rate etc., but can also be used for more complex data needs too.
#8 – B2B Infrastructure
Magento is a leader in cloud commerce, with their Magento 2 Commerce Cloud platform, and can deliver secure, stable and reliable experiences that can integrate with B2B legacy systems and your existing infrastructure.
For B2B brands, integration is key as there are many more technologies and tools needed to maintain your business operations. Your ecommerce platform needs to integrate with these.
Magento for B2B
Magento is one of the strongest ecommerce platforms for B2B ecommerce. We have experience building B2B ecommerce solutions on the platform for our clients, including Whispering Smith and Cablecraft, who take advantage of most of these features here.
If you need support exploring the right ecommerce platform for you, and are considering Magento for your B2B brand, then get in touch.
