Top 5 B2B eCommerce Scripts to Expand Your Business to B2B in 2020
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If you’re thinking about growing your eCommerce business and expand it to the B2B segment, it’s time to start building your B2B eCommerce website. Analysts say, the B2B eCommerce will reach $1.8 trillion by 2023 and it will continue growing by 10% annually.
We have analyzed the modern market of B2B eCommerce solutions and picked the 5 most balanced in terms of price/functionality.
2 Essential Features of B2B eCommerce CMS
Before making your final decision on the B2B eCommerce CMS, make sure the platform meets these requirements:
- B2B-specific functionality: In-bulk product ordering, hybrid eCommerce to run both B2B and B2C storefronts, admin and user roles, price lists, re-ordering, personal prices for customers of different levels, powerful API, and other.
- Customization capabilities: the platform must be customizable and scalable so that you could adapt it to your business processes. If you can’t modify the platform’s code or add functionality via API, your B2B eCommerce business won’t grow.
1. CS-Cart B2B & B2C
We focus on direct response and customer acquisition in e-commerce, lead gen, and mobile. When it comes to results and leads, we speak your language.
Rich functionality and ease of use are what CS-Cart eCommerce solutions are known for. CS-Cart B2B & B2C is no exception: it includes over 500 features to offer your B2B customers true B2C shopping experience. Not only it has all the essential features for business-to-business sales, but it’s also super customizable thanks to its downloadable nature and open source code.
The coolest thing about this script is that you can create multiple storefronts and set them up for B2B and B2C. This way you can run both businesses simultaneously. Storefronts are configured independently: design, settings, customers, products, prices, descriptions, and so on.
| Thumbs up: The ease of use, feature richness, and reasonable price (one-time fee). Users love CS-Cart’s clean architecture and open-source code. | Thumbs down: The default storefront design doesn’t meet modern standards. There are complaints about a complicated upgrade process if the store is heavily customized and the server configuration is wrong. |
2. SAP Commerce Cloud
SAP is a cloud-based platform with integration capabilities (you can expand its functions via API but you can’t modify the code). The company offers a number of business applications such as CRM and ERP and all of them natively integrate with their B2B eCommerce solution.
SAP Commerce Cloud can be used to build B2C, B2B, B2X, and hybrid online stores for manufacturers, wholesalers, and big distributors. The platform includes all the essential B2C functions such as cart checkout, product content and experience management, promotions, and order management. Important B2B functions are also present by default.
With SAP, you can sell both to B2B and B2C customers on the same storefront.
| Thumbs up: Powerful marketing and customer relationship management, ease of building a fully working eCommerce store in no time, great integration capabilities. | Thumbs down: Users report that the system is quite closed and it’s hard to find advice on forums or anywhere on the web. SAP Commerce Cloud is a SaaS solution, which means you’ll have to pay for it monthly. And some users say that the price is too high for the set of available features. |
3. TradeGecko
TradeGecko supports all essential B2B functions such as individual prices, custom price lists, the ability to hide products and prices from unauthorized users, easy ordering and reordering, warehouses, promotions, and more. The company’s primary goal is to make their solutions easy to use and automate B2B sales.
It is a cloud-based CMS, which means it’s super easy to start a wholesale ecommerce website on it. But its cloud nature limits you in terms of customization and scalability.
As a bonus, the platform has built-in analytics and reporting capabilities. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have functionality for advanced hybrid commerce. You can sell to both B2B and B2C customers but only through a single storefront.
| Thumbs up: Most of the users are satisfied with TradeGecko and appreciate its simplicity and good customer support. | Thumbs down: There are complaints about poor performance, lack of features, frequent changes of the admin panel design, and high monthly payments. |
4. OROCommerce
OROCommerce is a great wholesale eCommerce platform for starting B2C, B2B, and B2X online businesses. It’s suitable for big wholesalers, manufacturers, and distributors.
OROCommerce is an extremely flexible B2B eCommerce solution. It has all the essential B2B features including corporate accounts, user roles, multiple price lists, a good API for integrating with business systems, a robust promotion system, buyer-specific catalogs, and prices.
OROCommerce natively integrates with their own CRM system OROCRM that allows you to organize the customer contacts and arrange the customer interaction workflow. You’ll definitely need a CRM in your B2B store, so this feature will save you time and money.
Due to the platform’s cloud nature, it is limited in terms of customizability but its rich functionality partially compensates for the lack of customizability.
| Thumbs up: Flexibility, a great set of B2B functions, and hybrid business support. | Thumbs down: Users say that the platform has a long learning curve and developers complain about the lack of documentation. |
5. InsiteCommerce
InsiteCommerce features essential B2B functions such as fast reordering, advanced order management system with invoice generation and order statuses, the “Quotes” functionality, and built-in specific shipping options.
This CMS is all about integrations. It’s a SaaS B2B script but thanks to its “integration architecture” you can make minor customizations. For example, you can integrate the platform with 3rd-party services such as CRM, accounting, analytics using API.
| Pros: Powerful API and the “integration architecture” are the most appreciated advantages of InsiteCommerce as they compensate for its cloud nature. | Cons: User testimonials are mostly okay but there are some complaints about a very long learning curve, costly upgrades, and dependence on third-party partners. |
What now?
If you plan to build a complex B2B wholesale eCommerce website with all the necessary features for B2B clients and scale the website in the future, it is better to choose a downloadable software package with open source code such as CS-Cart B2B & B2C.
If your goal is to create a B2B website as an extension of your main business to use it as a catalog or a simple store for B2B clients with no need to scale it in the future, your choice is a SaaS platform with the API integration capabilities.