10 Best Magento B2B Features | Top Functionality to Boost Sales

For almost 20 years, Adobe Commerce (formerly known as Magento Commerce) has emerged as one of the top platforms for B2B eCommerce brands. The reason why is simple: Magento B2B features give business owners the functionality they need to serve their unique markets right out of the box.

At IWD, we’ve spent almost 15 years helping hundreds of B2B brands grow online by designing, implementing, and optimizing eCommerce sites that lead to increased conversions and better ROIs. Many of these have been B2B clients that leveraged our Magento development services. Here are two examples:

·       How We Improved Bobcat’s Revenue by 113% with Magento

·       How We Used Magento to Increase a Company’s Conversion Rate by 19%

While there are many, MANY reasons to love Magento, we’ve collected 15of our favorites in this post specifically for B2B:

• It's Open Source
• Multistore Functionality
• Mobile-Friendly
• Options for Displaying Prices
• Request a Quote
• Support for Complex Products
• Register Buyers
• B2B Buyer Accounts
• Shared Catalogs
• Requisition Lists
• Ordering with CSV Files
• Different Payment Methods
• Commission Management
• Magento Support
• Enhanced Security Features
• BONUS Feature

Check out this video if you want an in-depth explanation of everything Magento has to offer your B2B business. You can leave us a comment if you have any questions or down below this post. Of course, you can always contact us, too, if you have any questions about its powerful features.

Otherwise, without further ado, here are 15 big Magento B2B features that you’ll absolutely love for your business.

The first reason is that Magento Commerce is completely open source, which is one of the biggest features for any company, whether they’re B2B or not. Being an open-source platform means you can change any kind of Magento code you want to get the exact website your B2B market looks for when they’re ready to make purchases. This feature is one of the many that has made Magento so popular with B2B companies and nothing about that has changed since it got rebranded as Adobe Commerce.

The Open Source nature of Magento will give you complete flexibility and control, especially when you compare it to other popular platforms, like Shopify or BigCommerce. Look, those are still great platforms – even for B2B companies – but as they’re hosted, you don't get access to all their code. You can't change everything on them that you may want, which means – at some point – you’ll have to settle for certain limitations. You won’t be able to completely customize your eCommerce website so it’s 100% unique to your business.

So, if your business is in an industry where certain customizations would become a profitable competitive edge, Magento is easy to recommend. It’s also worth pointing out that Magento is fairly user-friendly given everything that it can do. While it’s still probably wise to work with a Magento agency or experienced developer, Magento is designed to make it as easy as possible for these professionals to customize your website a million different ways.

Another major advantage that Magento Commerce has over other platforms is that it can handle multiple stores through a single admin panel. This feature can be utilized in a number of very impressive ways. For one thing, say your B2B business also wants to sell to B2C customers. This will be much easier to do if you have a retail version of your website that’s designed specifically for the unique needs of B2C customers. Obviously, you don’t want to neglect your valuable B2B buyers, though.

Fortunately, with Magento Commerce, you can operate two different sites through one admin panel. Log into the same platform to see all your cells and how they’re doing at the same time. View all of your customers. Manage all of your products. This doesn’t just make everything a lot easier. Because you can stay logged into the same system to manage multiple storefronts, you’ll save a ton of time, as well.

The other reason this is such a huge advantage is because you can use it to manage multiple brands, too. So, if you're a manufacturer who could benefit from having a lot of B2C or B2B versions of your site – once again – you only need one admin panel to manage all of these elements. Trying to do that through multiple panels would be too time-consuming and expensive.

And the third reason why this feature is so popular amongst eCommerce organizations is because of the need for international sales. If you want to sell your products to customers in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, and France, you’ll see much better results if you have an eCommerce site for each of them. Among other things, this means you can offer different payment methods, different languages, and even different branding depending on what will work best for your business. For many organizations, that’s reason enough to invest in Magento Commerce, but the fact that you can manage those different versions from one admin panel is what really makes this great feature a no-brainer.

Magento isn’t just user-friendly and developer-friendly. Magento is also extremely mobile-friendly, too. This is obviously a must for B2C companies because so many customers go shopping on their phones no matter what time of day or what day of the week. But for a long time, it was assumed that B2B buyers just weren’t interested in shopping “after hours.”

That’s changed over the past decade, though. We now know that B2B buyers behave much more like their B2C counterparts, which means they’re definitely using mobile devices to research their options, consider different sellers, and ultimately make a purchase – even wholesale purchases (something Magento is also great at; more on that later). This is why B2B websites absolutely must be mobile-friendly, even when they’re built with all the B2B features that these customers now demand. With Magento, this isn’t just possible. It’s easy.

There are a number of reasons many B2B business owners don’t want to display complete price lists on their sites, which is why so many of them love this next Magento B2B feature: the option to hide or selectively display prices on your B2B website.

This is particularly useful for wholesalers who tend to be more sensitive about sharing their prices online. Magento’s “Hide Price” functionality will let you set flexible pricing policies by hiding prices from certain customer groups, such as wholesalers, and prompting them to contact the seller for a personalized quote (more on that next). This approach not only caters to the purchasing power of different customer groups but also fosters profitable relationships between sellers andbuyers.

While Magento Commerce/Adobe Commerce doesn’t completely support this feature, necessitating the use of a specialized “Hide Price” extension. This extension provides the ability to hide prices on specific products or categories for selected customer groups, and to customize the “Add to Cart” button with a redirect link or custom text.

Moreover, the extension allows for an “automatic” price inquiry method, where interested buyers can quickly request a price through a “Call for Price” form right on your Magento site, submitting their desired price instantly – no permissions required. For more nuanced pricing strategies, the “Magento 2 Price Per Customer” tool enables the admin to set different prices for the same product across different customer groups, with the custom price completely replacing the original. This tool is also compatible with the Hyva theme and allows for the mass assignment of price rules based on conditions.

Of course, if you decide to hide your prices on your Magento store, you’ll need to offer shoppers another option to find out how much your products cost. Magento stand out is its option to easily request a quote. In short, custom pricing is common practice among B2B companies that sell to wholesalers.

If you have a B2B customer who regularly makes large purchases – or you believe has the potential to – offering them a quote at a discounted rate is a smart way to keep their business for years to come. At the same time, you wouldn’t want to offer a blanket discount for all B2B wholesalers. B2B buyers who orders10,000 items should probably get a different quote than buyers who only orders 100. With Magento’s request-a-quote feature, you don’t have to worry about these kinds of blanket quotes. Wholesalers can request a quote through your store, and it will be immediately sent to your administrator panel and your team will receive a notification.

At that point, your team can approve the request for a custom quote or offer different terms instead. The request-a-quote feature ensures that the customer can try to negotiate a counteroffer, too. Allowing for this kind of back-and-forth makes it possible to lock in more wholesale business at prices that keep everyone happy. It also streamlines the ensuing process that leads to purchase orders, fulfillment, and customer satisfaction.

The next thing that Magento does so well compared to other platforms is handling complex products. Right out of the box, you can rely on Magento to handle:

• Simple Products
• Configurable Products
• Bundled Products

I could probably write a whole post about all the different ways you can leverage this Magento B2B feature, but if you’re a manufacturer, the big takeaway is that, out-of-the-box, you can support as many configurations as you want from your website with Magento. You don’t need to limit yourself in terms of what you’re able to sell from your B2B site. You also don’t need to worry that trying to list complex projects will involve cutting corners that will ultimately hurt your B2B conversions. And when you combine this with the pricing features we just covered, it becomes obvious why Magento is considered such a versatile platform by so many B2B business owners. Magento won’t limit your ability to show off your inventory while also managing which B2B customers see which – if any – prices.

The seventh reason to love Magento is how easily it will allow you to register companies as B2B buyers. This includes businesses that apply to be part of your B2B wholesale system. Magento comes ready for businesses that want to set up these kinds of registration portals to upgrade or improve their wholesale registrations and, thus, their profits.

With Magento, you’ll have everything you need, from creating that portal to adding the form to approving the provided credentials. Combined with the other features we’ve already covered, this makes the platform incredibly powerful for not just increasing conversions but also average order values. By treating whole companies the same way you would a typical B2C buyer, you streamline the ability of these businesses to quickly make large purchases again and again without any unnecessary friction.

The eighth thing that Magento has over a lot of other eCommerce platforms out there is its level of account management it supports. This allows you to register employees and businesses and to give them different roles. This takes that last feature we just covered even further. Not only can you create a buyer account for your favorite company. You can create separate roles for different staff members and decide what permissions they’ll have in terms of access and purchasing. So, for example, you can create an account for a company and then register their managers who then own the approval process for large orders.

You can also allow your employees to request approval for roles they need to do their jobs. This feature is similar to what Amazon allows, where a customer can request, “hey I need to buy this large order” and then that order goes to a manager for approval. You can have sales roles, so that they can register companies. They can also have their own reports for their sales commissions and then you can even have organizational groups under this, as well.

This functionality offers benefits for both sellers and buyers. Sellers can manage customer accounts, set pricing rules, and tailor marketing campaigns, while buyers can create company accounts, assign roles, and track data like orders and quotes. It also supports the Hyva theme.

Additionally, Magento’s Custom Customer Attributes allows the collection of detailed B2B customer information during registration by adding custom fields to the sign-up form. This feature supports various input types and is compatible with the Hyva theme.

To control the quality of account registrations, the Magento 2 Customer Approval feature enables admins to approve or reject new accounts, helping to prevent fraud and server overload.

Lastly, the Sales Rep feature allows the creation of sales representative roles, enabling the assignment of customers to specific sales personnel, fostering better customer management and satisfaction. This feature is also Hyva theme compatible.

This level of account creation and management will make it easier to effectively manage your wholesalers and give them different permissions, so that they can have whatever approval processes make sense for placing large orders with your company.

And it gets even better when it comes to hyper-focusing on unique B2B clients. Not only can you create accounts for them with different roles and levels of access, but you can also create a shared catalog for a company that will show them entirely unique pricing just for them. And you can do this as many times as you want to create these unique catalogs with as many businesses as you want. You’ll still have access to your master catalog, of course, but you can update, delete, and manage these custom versions however you want, whenever you want right from your Magento site’s admin panel.

The 10th Magento feature I want to highlight is really amazing: requisition lists.

They are very similar to the traditional type of wish list you commonly find on B2C websites, but where they differ is extremely important. It’s yet another way Magento has helped B2B companies multiply their revenues. Both lists comprise all kinds of products a buyer wants. But with a wish list, those products are deleted once the buyer orders them.

With a requisition list, the products stay on that list. This way, when it’s time to reorder, your wholesale buyer doesn’t need to waste time starting from scratch or risking forgetting important items. A requisition list means that your eCommerce company can offer the most valuable buyers – wholesalers – greater convenience and assurance of their purchase. For you, this means a greater conversion rate, more repeat business, and increased average order values (AOVs).

Speaking of keeping everyone happy, let’s talk about CSV files and why they make such a big difference for B2B companies that use Magento. Larger wholesalers may easily purchase thousands of products at a time through your Magento site, which is a HUGE change if you’ve tried supporting this type of feature with another platform before that isn’t as B2B-friendly.

Instead offorcing these important buyers to order their wholesale amounts one product at a time. You can make it easy. With Magento, let them upload a CSV file to your system or even automate the simple step to make it even easier still. The CSV file tells you what they want and in what quantities.

This level of convenience is always a huge plus for eCommerce companies and their B2B buyers, many of whom may be ordering when their stock is suddenly unexpectedly low. When time is of the essence, they’re just a simple CSV file away from placing massive orders through your Magento website.

The twelfth major B2B solution Magento offers is the option to set different payment methods for different customers based on the way you want to group them.

So, once again, if your Magento site attracts wholesale customers from different countries all over the world, it would make sense to support payment options based on their location. Many companies also want to extend Net 30 credit lines to some of their wholesalers so they can make greater purchases through their Magento sites. Whatever the case, right out of the box, Magento supports a wide range of payment options for locking in the most amount of business across all of your customer segments.

Okay, the 11th feature that Magento has is the ability to manage your sales representatives, including setting their commission rates. You can do all of this right through your Magento dashboard, which means there’s no need for a separate platform to handle this very important element of your B2B business.

In fact, you can actually automate much of the process with Magento. So, even if you have sales reps working across multiple company accounts and through multiple commission structures, Magento makes it effortless to pull the amount their owed every payment period. And, as we covered earlier, this works even if you’re using Magento to create multiple storefronts for your B2B company.

If you ever need any help with your Magento website, you can always contact us.

However, one of the many benefits of having a Magento account is that you also have access to the amazing technical support that comes with owning an Adobe platform (Magento’s support was great before it became “Adobe Commerce”, of course, but Adobe is renowned for their support services).

Magento Commerce provides specialized technical assistance to B2B merchants, ensuring their eCommerce platforms operate efficiently. The Magento support team handles problem-solving, site updates, and access to Magento B2B documentation and a comprehensive knowledge base. For further assistance, B2B users can submit support tickets, enabling the Magento support team to address and resolve any operational challenges with a solution unique to your situation.

While all of the B2B features we just listed are great, they wouldn’t be worth much if Magento didn’t offer users fantastic security measures. And, again, this is another example of a feature that was already fantastic before Magento was bought and transformed into Adobe Commerce. But with Adobe in control, you can rest assured that your account is safe-and-sound with this platform.

Magento places a high emphasis on security for B2B eCommerce, recognizing the importance of safeguarding sensitive customer and transaction data. It offers a suite of robust security measures including two-factor authentication, strong data encryption, regular security updates, and adherence to PCI standards.

In addition to these, Magento Commerce Cloud adds layers of protection with features like a Content Delivery Network (CDN), DDoS protection, a Web Application Firewall (WAF), and penetration testing. It also ensures a secure environment with a read-only file system, remote deployment capabilities, and regular backups.

Furthermore, Managed Magento Hosting providers enhance these security provisions, offering additional features to defend online stores against potential cyber threats. B2B merchants are advised to thoroughly evaluate the security services and tools offered by their hosting providers to ensure comprehensive protection for their eCommerce operations.

Obviously, we’re big fans of all the ways B2B organizations can skyrocket sales by leveraging everything Magento Commerce/Adobe Commerce has to offer. All the B2B features we just covered are amazing all on their own and will produce incredible results. And it’s not just sales. Magento can upgrade practically every aspect of your B2B store, from order management to inventory management to shared catalogs to shipping methods and more.

But here at IWD, we can actually take your B2B Magento store further with customized extensions that are designed with your site’s specific needs in mind. This type of tailormade solution can be the competitive edge that skyrockets your store past others in your industry.

Contact our Magento experts today if you’re curious to learn about building one of these features for your website.

Also, if you want to see one of the extensions we’ve designed, we’ve built our own unique Adobe Commerce checkout extension that is completely free and can be customized to serve your unique market.

Whether you’re thinking about switching to Magento Commerce/Adobe Commerce (or even Magento Open Source) or you’re already running your store on this platform but want to take greater advantage of all it has to offer your B2B business, we’re here to help.

Contact our team of Magento B2B experts to learn more about these B2B features and everything that Magento can do for your store.

For more information about the popular platform, check out these other blog posts:

• 20 Essential Magento SEO Tips
• How Much a Magento Website Costs
• Magento Commerce vs. Open Source
• How to Track Magento Checkouts with Google Analytics
• How to Flush Your Magento Cache