E-Commerce Answers

Just this month BigCommerce announced the launch of “B2B Edition,” its enterprise version that incorporates features from B2B app provider “Bundle B2B.” This is an important announcement for BigCommerce and a great opportunity for e-commerce integrators (like Accorin) to provide another great option for mid-market B2B merchants.

With the ease and convenience of managing SaaS e-commerce infrastructure, B2B e-commerce merchants can now offer their customers core B2B functionality. B2B merchants often struggle to balance the investment of the more expensive and robust B2B e-commerce stacks, and the need to provide customers with a B2C-like user experience. At Accorin, we believe BigCommerce now offers a very viable B2B solution for SMB and mid-market B2B merchants.

B2B Edition Gives BigCommerce a New Dimension

Prior to this announcement, BigCommerce was a stepping stone platform competing with Shopify, but with a superior app (plugin) called “Bundle B2B,” developed and maintained by a separate developer. This meant that customers needed to login separately and manage the app functionality separately from BigCommerce. But not anymore! Bundle B2B has now been completely integrated with the core BigCommerce platform – rebranded to “B2B Edition.”

As a BigCommerce Solution Partner, we’ve gotten to know the product intimately, and we like what we are seeing. It doesn’t have as extensive of a B2B feature set compared to Adobe Commerce. However it offers a core set of B2B features that will work for many B2B merchants, especially manufacturers and distributors.

The Key Benefits of B2B Edition

BigCommerce is marketing the B2B Edition to B2B merchants and brands that want to sell wholesale. This means potentially helping brands that are selling B2B for the first time or helping brands that want to ramp up from “occasional wholesale purchasing activity” to becoming true wholesalers. BigCommerce believes the key benefits include:

1. Empower Sales Teams

Speed up deals with the ability for sales reps to create custom quotes and discounts, as well as log in, shop and purchase on behalf of customers.

2. Reduce Friction in the Path to Purchase

Attract new buyers and make life easier for loyal customers. Advanced payment options, shared shopping lists and buy-again capabilities allow customers to buy their way.

3. Tailor the Customer Experience

Define custom account hierarchies and price lists to show each customer exactly what they need to see — all on a responsive, mobile-friendly site

We believe B2B Edition also provides a clear path for business expansion by enabling brands with a B2C2B model (and vice-versa). Mid market brands and merchants must be nimble and that means being able to sell retail and wholesale; BigCommerce B2B Edition now enables both these quite nicely and it does so while still offering all of its legacy value proposition: dependable, high-performance infrastructure, the unique Stencil-based front end for designing and enabling great UX, and a boat load of apps that can extend functionality.

Key Features of B2B Edition

The key features of the BigCommerce B2B Edition include:

Price quote management, which lets sales reps develop custom price quotes and discounts;

Managing multiple customer purchasing roles and permissions, providing customers the pricing and other information that need to access;

Client address books;

Multiple payment methods;

Buy again or reorder feature;

Quick-order pad;

Customer account management by sales agents and supervisors, who can make approved purchases on behalf of customers.

Compared to Shopify

Shopify merchants can get some B2B functionality using integrated apps and plugins. The challenge would be that if a merchant integrates 5 or 6 apps to get the basic B2B functionality they need, the cost is going to increase and the complexity of managing all of those apps is going to be a burden on some manager somewhere.

We love Shopify, but it is not our first choice for B2B merchants with any scale....

Like just about everyone we’re all itching to do some travel, hit some trade shows and get back to doing business in person. The pandemic is slowly loosening its grip, so we’re carefully planning what events and shows will provide the most bang for the buck. After all, we don’t want to be spending $thousands only to find that vendors, clients, and prospects are hunkered down.

So, here’s our plan for the rest of the year as we learn how to converse in person again; based on a combination of rumour, verbal commitments and casual shows of hands during Zoom calls, we believe these shows are the ones worth going to in person if you are going to venture out this year. As with everything in our world as the pandemic winds down, our plans include “In-Person” and “Virtual” events:

1. Outdoor Retailer

Denver, CO – August 10-12 (In Person)

The outdoor industry has boomed during the pandemic and the nature of the sessions and day-to-day conversations includes a lot of B2B so this one is a good fit for e-commerce ecosystem vendors. Denver is also easy to get to from either coast and although it’s a mid-Summer date the weather is typically great and the Rocky Mountains are right there for those wanting to tag on a summer vacation after the show.

This show will be heavy with apparel manufacturers, equipment manufacturers, suppliers for different outdoor sports and the most prominent outdoor retailers. Since a lot of pre-booking and purchasing happens at this show we are anxious to see how e-commerce is evolving in this industry.

2. E-commerce Operations Summit

Nashville (Gaylord Opryland) – August 17-18 (In-person)

This is a great conference because sessions typically focus on the “guts” of e-commerce, including logistics, order management and warehouse management, but increasingly the show includes strategic business presentations.

The show is presented by MultichannelMerchant.com whose sponsors typically are heavy into infrastructure and software. There will be a range of folks at this conference from logistics and warehousing providers, ISVs, agencies and service companies and retailers like Tractor Supply that are thriving on the new world of B2B2C in retail (also an Adobe / Magento merchant).

Nashville is a great city to visit and like most of the destinations we are considering is one flight from either coast or the center of the country’s hubs. It makes for a crowded August but it’s definitely one we are considering!

Learn More:/

3. Retail X

Chicago (Mccormick Place) – August 24 – 25 (In Person)

We know several key Accorin partners (BigCommerce, Exclusive Concepts and others) are planning to attend and / or sponsor. And with several clients in the Chicago area, with Chicago being a retail, logistics and e-commerce hub in the middle of the country we believe this show will be well-attended because of short drives and easy air transit access for most.

BigCommerce will be playing an important role in two of the Keynote sessions: “Redefining Post-Pandemic Experiences” and “Hybrid Retail”.

We’ll soon be announcing our plans to co-sponsor a not-to-be-missed social event along with BigCommerce and Exclusive Concepts during Retail X very soon!

Learn more here:/

4. E-commerce Expo

UK – September 29 – 30 (Currently Virtual)

The UK is lagging behind the US in opening up so this one in the early Fall looks like it will be virtual. This was a fantastic virtual conference last Fall with great sessions, virtual networking software, a fantastic list of vendors presenting new technologies, and speakers presenting current case studies across B2C and B2B.

Learn more:

5. Internet Retailing Expo (IRX)

Birmingham, England – October 12-15 (Currently In-Person)

Think of this event as a Retail X of the UK that also attracts a lot of attendees from Europe. Our thought is that this event could be the first big in-person event in the UK and so long as you are comfortable working a crowd (after being vaccinated, of course) this will be a great one to attend. A...

Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is a cloud-based technology that allows enterprises to control and manipulate customer data profiles in a way that helps them make digital experiences perform much better through relevance and experience quality – and performance means profits. With all such powerful, robust marketing-technology platforms and tools, AEP is certainly not a cheap solution, but rather than asking the short-sighted question of, “how much does AEP cost?”, e-commerce marketing professionals should be considering, “is the investment is worth the payoff?”

The Challenge of Enterprise Data and Adobe Experience Platform

Many enterprises (both B2C and B2B) struggle with control, manipulation and deployment of data-based experiences. The Adobe Experience Platform is the Adobe stack for finally taking care of that. The value proposition for AEP is defined on their features page:

Centralize all your customer experience data to build real-time customer profiles and apply powerful data science and AI for instant personalized cross-channel experiences at scale.

The technology allows enterprises to ingest, standardize and store customer data. It provides a unified data foundation that creates real time customer profiles so you can deliver customer experiences based on real time needs. For enterprises with significant e-commerce presences this is very important because it allows them to realize percentage point gains across a number of key metrics:

Increase average cart value

Increase revenue per year / lifetime value (LTV)

Decrease abandonment and turnover

Increase ROAS

And many more.

Typically, all of these metrics start to improve by percentage points if a merchant finally has control over their data and is able to offer personalized, relevant experiences from the time of the first digital interaction. But getting a handle on customer data and deploying it the right way is expensive. AEP is expensive and it’s expensive to design, develop, configure and deploy.

The question is at what point and for what size organization is a tool like AEP affordable and a wise investment? By looking at some e-commerce metrics and some related math that a merchant can positively impact using the AEP tool set, I would argue that more companies, smaller enterprises should consider sooner than they think on their growth curve. Let’s look at a hypothetical payback model; the following numbers are for illustration only.

The Cost: Can You Afford It?

Sorry, but like any enterprise software implementation the cost for licensing and deploying AEP is going to have a very wide range. But for the purpose of this brief article let’s assume the following about our hypothetical company contemplating an investment in Adobe Experience Platform:

$600mm revenue

Net profit before taxes $180mm

5,000 customers 6% growth

$120 revenue per customer per year

$200mm current e-commerce revenue

$150mm B2B e-commerce GMV

$ 50mm B2C e-commerce GMV

92% of all new customers in 2020 interacted with the company website prior to purchasing

And let’s say the total investment required including “internal” time is $2.5mm in year one.

It seems like a lot of money doesn’t it? Now let’s consider using very conservative metrics that a tool like this might deliver against:

Revenue per Customer Increase: 12% increase

Decrease in marketing operation costs / Increase in ROAS of $1.5mm

Increase in #customers through referral: 10%

Average order value increase from $60 to $70 (about 12%)

With these improvements the company would realize a gross impact of $4mm in revenue improvements in year that is measurable and that tracks back to experience improvements that are attributable back to AEP . Even if measured against net profit on that revenue, the investment comes close to breaking even after the first year.

The Bottom Line

While mid-market and “not-quite enterprise” scale companies may believe they can’t afford investments in digital transformation projects like an implementation of Adobe Ex...

For many e-commerce merchants the business of growth is associated with driving customers and converting them on their own e-commerce website. But it’s important to realize that the modern e-commerce business needs to capitalize on a multi-channel approach in order to achieve growth. Depending upon the type of business and the type of products that are being sold, marketplaces can provide a number of those channels, and potentially even a primary growth generator.

Marketplaces provide your business access to many more customers and the ability to sell products to people that are already searching for the products that you sell on the marketplace site. A decade ago there were a limited number of marketplaces to integrate with an e-commerce store and the two primary marketplaces were just Amazon and eBay. Today, thanks to the number of marketplace software vendors that exist, there are many specialty marketplaces in addition to the large consumer marketplaces that can help e-commerce merchants expand reach and revenue. But where should you start if your business or your company is just breaking out “beyond the catalog and cart?” Here are our thoughts on where to start – albeit a bit B2C centric.

Amazon

Obviously Amazon provides monstrous opportunities for many e-commerce businesses while others that are completely unique with their product offering can afford to stay off of it. For most US-based, consumer-focused B2C e-commerce merchants, Amazon is almost always worth a try. Why? Amazon provides access to millions of customers saving you the cost of driving traffic to and converting customers on your website. But you need to balance using Amazon as a channel with the cost of selling there and the cost of not owning the customer. There is work to do setting up a product feed, integrating with your product catalog and managing an Amazon storefront if you choose to do that. You will have to work through Amazon to work with that customer because that customer belongs to them.

Read about getting started on Amazon here (it’s a good primer even if you know how to sell on Amazon and a good up-to-date resource because their rules change all the time).

So, Amazon – Yes or No?

It’s definitely worth a test – start with your biggest best sellers, promote them with a reasonable budget, and see how your margins work. The volume of orders may convince you that Amazon should be a primary part of your multichannel mix!

Google Merchant Center

Google merchant center is essentially a pay-to-play marketplace where your products will show in the product feed of search results pages on Google. Maybe. If you set up your feed right and if you bid enough. However, if you learn to do this correctly, it can have enormous benefits to your business. If you’ve managed Google Adwords before in any of its generations of availability, then essentially you will be working the same way with products in your feed that you set up to show in the “Merchant Center” feed.

Since Google users can easily sort their search results by News, Shopping, Images, Videos and Maps, your products may also show up when a user goes deeper into the “Shopping” tab which looks like this:

To get started on Google Merchant Center, take a look at this helpful guide. or their “Beginner’s Guide”.

Google Merchant Center – Yes or No?

It may take some testing and it’s possible to get “free” listings without sponsoring them if your product is unique enough. But with Millions of users, the Google Merchant Center feed is worth it to see if you can get traction with millions of people searching for products like yours.

Walmart

Walmart obviously sells just about every type of consumer good via their retail stores, so it makes sense that they’re using the massive customer base to compete with Amazon online in e-commerce as well. Rather than starting from scratch, they bought e-commerce disruptor, Jet.com in 2016 to jump start their e-commerce presence. With a 120mm+ visitors per month it’s potential...

These days it’s not uncommon for technology managers in corporations to be charged with e-commerce and digital transformation projects at the same time. This means that projects will compete for resources and budgets, and stakeholders can be confused about priorities and when they will have their needs addressed.

As a part of helping companies with the e-commerce side, we are often witness to the debates and discussions that come with these competing initiatives. We find that there are typically 4 key elements to consider in determining how resources in the modern digital organization can stay focused and deliver on both types of initiatives simultaneously.

1. Agree to an API-focused or “Open” Architecture Across Initiatives

Especially if the stack of digital transformation and e-commerce products is different, technology management needs to avoid dead ends. Software products, SaaS services and e-commerce platforms can’t be so proprietary that they can’t be connected. Everything needs an API or readily available ways to connect to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tools. This may be a moot point if you’re committing to a full stack of products managed by one software brand (e.g. Adobe, Oracle, IBM etc), but in the dynamic, ever-changing world of today’s global companies acquiring and changing constantly we only see this situation rarely.

We have built EAI tools for Magento and the major SaaS e-commerce platforms (BigCommerce and Shopify), so that integration with other business systems – whether new or dated – is relatively straightforward.

This open approach will allow digital transformation and e-commerce projects to happen in any order and will support an “agile” approach where pieces of each can be developed and deployed in an effort to provide value to users as quickly as possible.

2. ERP as Centerpiece of Digital Transformation: Compatibility with E-Commerce

We often see ERP as the focus of the digital transformation in the enterprise, and we endorse this approach because we endorse the “system of truth” philosophy that having one can provide. As a part of your ERP selection, give a nod to the e-commerce platforms you are considering to make sure you have made the right choice.

At Accorin, we’ve worked with 20+ ERPs; integrating them with Adobe Commerce (Magento), Shopify, BigCommerce, and Salesforce CC. Some of the most popular ERPs we encounter in mid-market and enterprise include Netsuite, Epicor, SAP, and Sage. We’ve built EAI tools, including The Integrator, that allow merchants to see order flows from the ERP into e-commerce regardless of the source.

Consider an ERP that has API access, and that has been integrated previously with the more popular e-commerce platforms.

3. E-Commerce Platform – When?

Once the modern enterprise has committed to digital transformation, a number of projects and commitments to digital systems usually results, well beyond an ERP selection. These types of projects can include Product Information Management (PIM), Project Management Software, Digital Asset Management (DAM) , Human Resource Management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Marketing Automation, Data Warehousing, and much more.

So, is it still important to consider the order, priority of e-commerce? It’s now an interconnected world of apps. So long as the systems are open and the compatibility has been established, the answer is no. However, even with open systems and APIs, the timing of an e-commerce re-platform should be considered so that integration with an ERP or other major systems only needs to happen once.

4. Consider the Most Intrusive Aspects of a Big E-Commerce Project

A major e-commerce migration or replatforming can be very intrusive to an existing e-commerce or omni-channel business. We’ve found that the most disruptive parts can be Customer Data Migration and Order Data Migration. It’s important to consider that you want to engage in these migrations as few times as possible, so if there are opport...

We’ve alluded to ‘Creation of a Plan’ vs ‘Selection of a Platform’ as a “Chicken vs Egg’ problem in the past; we’ve done this primarily because we see many client prospects wrestling with this decision. As strategists, consultants, software architects and planners, we love to advocate that the best way to start a complex e-commerce project is to create a plan first! It’s our firm position that by flushing out all of the needs and requirements, and creating a roadmap first, there will be consensus, fast adoption, and the most productive features needed will get launched first.but maybe not?

Let’s take a look at the problem upside down, to advocate that now, in an e-commerce world of headless approaches and hyper-innovation from the platforms, maybe it’s OK to review and select a platform first. Any maybe this approach is actually a bit more agile and practical than creating the plan first. Here’s why:

Let the Platform’s Capabilities Inspire Your Roadmap

With the hyper-speed growth of e-commerce, the platform companies (and number of platforms) are growing quickly, innovating at speed and launching new features faster than they ever have. Why not review these features and roadmaps first and let them guide your plan as an e-commerce merchant? It’s quite possible that a new SaaS platform set of features can solve a number of problems and help you increase your revenue substantially over a few years.

Learn About the Platforms and Solve the Biggest Problems First

Platform review through presentation, demo and studying release notes may actually provide the requirements that you’re looking for. Many of the e-commerce platforms are in an arms race of features and functionality. Your agencies and SIs can help you customize these platforms to suit your very specific needs, but if you have a prioritized list of problems that you are trying to solve, you can probably explore 2 or 3 platforms and make a decision on one platform that solves the most number of problems with the biggest ROI. It’s not a perfect approach but it might be one that makes financial sense. It also might be worthwhile to throw a few 3rd party tools into the mix in your review. If your business is suffering from a lack of ratings and reviews and subscription revenue, maybe you don’t need to change platforms; maybe you need to add on those features.

Agile is Always an Option

Creating a plan can take time (and expense), and elongates your time to market. If the business is just getting started, even if it’s part of a larger brand or parent company, the “plan first” route is a great idea. But if you have an existing e-commerce operation with staff budgets, revenue projections and metrics, the chances are you can model what feature enhancements will have the ROI that will help you achieve your financial objectives. You can build consensus around features that solve the most pain and move forward – but you need to make sure to (see next section) understand the costs of each platform as well.

Beat the Platform Price Increases

The cost of platforms keeps going up and the overall cost of e-commerce operations continues to increase as merchants invest more and as platforms innovate. Even the SaaS platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce understand how performance drives success, so any merchant in the “millions” of online revenue bracket will have to pay for an “enterprise” version that will cost 4-500% more than five years ago. The days of opening a SaaS-powered shop for $129/mo are long gone – and with good reason.

The Bottom Line

Every major e-commerce project needs a plan, especially if there is any complexity to the business and if there are a number of complex integrations. But we’re willing to concede that it’s not a bad idea to start with platform reviews first to fully understand the capability of a few vendors that you might be investing a lot of money with over the next few years.

This step will benefit you, the merchant, and the platform companies as they will und...

The second (and hopefully last) virtual Adobe Summit (formerly Magento Imagine) was held last week with hundreds of speakers and sessions April 27-29. Accorin sponsored the Commerce Track sessions but many of us wandered outside of that track in search of some deeper understanding of Adobe’s AXP (Adobe Experience Platform) integration plans for Magento, a glimpse of state-of-the-art marketing tech, and some entertainment with celebrities.

The session catalog was overwhelming but given the virtual format it was nice to be able to double up on sessions and review and replay the video from sessions that you missed. Adobe also did an awesome job with its conference app. Some virtual conference apps are good, some are bad. Adobe’s was GREAT – I found myself browsing and listening to sessions by phone more often than not, just because the interface was more tuned to browsing.

Adobe’s annual conference is typically gigantic; 4 or 5 times the size of Magento Imagine. It was nice to be able to skip around to different sessions – something that is not possible “in-person.” One can only hope that this type of conference app can be combined with in-person format in the years to come.

Here are 5 sessions from the two days that we thought were the most compelling (at least to the Accorin team) from an e-commerce perspective.

1. The New Commerce Imperative with Jason Woosley

This session was a great mix of Jason (VP Commerce Product / Platform at Adobe and former Magento head of product) recommending how to apply Adobe Commerce’s top new features along with a glimpse of where the product development team is headed next in response to e-commerce market pressures.

Jason recapped the best features of recent releases, including the new features of B2B, new B2B workflows, and the integration of Adobe Sign into the checkout process. Adobe is pushing hard on integration of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven experiences because of its focus on AXP and Adobe Commerce fits right in.

“Seller Assisted Shopping” is a value of the features framework as is the combination of Headless Commerce / PWA studio – with the focus of product development being to maximize flexibility.

E-commerce is complex, ever-evolving, and always on with all of its integrations and Adobe has a new Site Wide Analysis Tool (SWAT) that provides proactive site reviews and suggested changes – “best practices in one place – best practices as a service.” SWAT is available as of Version 2.4.

The integration of Sensei was a key topic that was discussed in a number of sessions including this one – including its importance for B2B as well: “B2B merchants are looking to create the ultimate B2C-like experience but with robust B2B requirements” and Sensei with AI-driven product recommendations is a key aspect of meeting B2B buyer requirements for satisfying purchasing experiences day after day.

Jason’s presentation stressed the 5 e-commerce success factors that can be achieved with Adobe Commerce:

Agility – the ability to change, evolve and move quickly to changing market forces (are you ready for the recovery?)

Continuous exploration of and opening of new channels

Enabling new buyer journeys as a business innovates

International expansion

Flexibility and capability with insights and “best practices as a service”

2. 5 Fundamental Steps to Becoming Data Driven – Petra Blixt Svenska Spel Sports and Casino

One of the great things about the virtual conference at scale is being able to view off-hours international content on demand. Normally I wouldn’t attend the European sessions because of the time difference; however, at Adobe Summit Virtual the presentation format made it easy.

Svenska is essentially the state run gambling business in Sweden. Petra provided some great insights on how an organization became data driven by using practical examples from their work. Petra first defined “data driven” right from Google: ”……enabling companies to examine and organize their...

Accorin is pleased to announce a set of recently updated B2B-focused extensions for Adobe Commerce just in time for Adobe Summit 2021. These extensions support the framework of Self-Service B2B e-commerce which Accorin designs, builds, and manages on behalf of its B2B clients.

Now more than ever it’s vital for B2B merchants to provide their business buyers with an e-commerce experience that is truly self-service. Accorin has built five extensions that help merchants who have already adopted the great out-of-the-box B2B features of Adobe Commerce 2.4 to provide their business buyers with even more self-service. Accorin provides its extensions to its clients free of charge under an open-source license. Accorin will license its extensions to other parties on a case-by-case basis. Here are the extensions that have been recently updated:

Shared Requisition Lists

This extension builds on the out-of-the-box requisition list functionality by integrating it with the company structure of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source 2 and allowing for sharing of approved requisition lists.

Key features include:

Centrally create and edit Requisition Lists to be used by employees throughout the company.

Company OR Personal Requisition Lists can be used.

Multiple B2B Company Requisition Lists can be shared within the company.

Requisition Lists can be shared with everybody in the company, or a just a subset of employees.

Multiple buyers within the same organization can share and utilize requisition lists to ensure purchasing policies are followed and accurate. Complex organizations can help themselves organize their buying behavior and reduce interaction time with your customer service reps and sales reps.

Company Address Book

This handy extension provides the address book functionality with additional capabilities so that it can be used with Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source B2B company structure. How?

Centrally create and edit an address book for a company (i.e. different locations/stores)

Control access to address books within company hierarchy to control shipments

Integrates with Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source company hierarchy

This extension allows merchants to set up customer companies with controls that ensure that specific shipping addresses are used by specific users within the company structure; it also controls shipments and prevents users from shipping to unauthorized addresses.

Previously Purchased Products

Provides B2B customers with a handy view of product-level details related to previous orders. Specifically, this extension provides:

More granular order detail than Core “view orders”

Logged in customers with the ability to easily view all previously purchased products

Logged in customers with the ability to reorder previously purchased products

Key Self-Service Benefit

This extension enables customers to easily find products that they’ve purchased in the past regardless of which orders they are associated with. This saves time with customer service, sales, and account reps on your team!

Integrator and One View

These B2B-focused extensions also pair nicely with two other administrative extensions that site managers will love: The Integrator and One View. The Integrator is an Enterprise Application Integration tool built just for Magento 2. This extension makes it easy to connect Adobe Commerce to external systems so that orders, product data, inventory, customer and shipment data can move back and forth smoothly. The Integrator also makes it easy for Adobe Commerce Site Administrators to manage integration interfaces right from its own Adobe Commerce Admin panel.

The OneView module supports customer self-service by unifying all of a customer’s Orders, Shipments, Invoices, and Returns. Regardless of whether your customers placed the original order in Adobe Commerce, a legacy system or over the phone into your ERP, you are able to give your customers a way to see and interact with their information through their Adobe...

We talk a lot about B2B e-commerce on Magento, especially in relation to our own B2B extensions and the self-service model, but what about the other SaaS-based e-commerce platforms we work with? Is it possible for SMBs to run B2B e-commerce on BigCommerce and Shopify? The answer is a not so simple, “yes.but.”

For complex enterprise businesses that sell B2B, and even for B2C brands that sell B2C but also have a B2B channel, Adobe Commerce is a great fit for many reasons. However, the popular SaaS platforms can also support SMB merchants with less complex B2B requirements and also provide a merchant with all of the benefits of SaaS. But there are caveats.

Let’s take a look at how some SMB merchants are using Shopify and BigCommerce for B2B transactions and what the possible risks are for using apps, plugins and extensions to accommodate more complex B2B requirements.

Shopify

We know what a great platform this is for B2C; it’s proven simplicity, abundance of themes and easy-to-use admin interface make it a favorite for consumer brands and startups. But what if your brand wants to service some business buyers? Can you accommodate them on Shopify? Yes, but depending on your business, you will probably need to solve for those use cases with a Shopify app or two.

Here’s some perspective on how Shopify merchants can solve the problem:

1. If There Are Only a Few B2B Buyers

You can accommodate a few B2B use cases if you need to without much risk or problem at all. For example, if you have a few thousand customers but less than 10 B2B buyers and their most important requirement is a wholesale price, and every purchase is stable without much need for intervention, you may decide to solve for that by simply providing that customer with a promo code giving a percentage off.

2. All B2B Buyers Have the Same Wholesale Price

In cases where the B2B buyers all have the same pricing structure, we have seen some distributors that only sell to mom and pop / small retailers use Shopify and they simply make it a password-protected site. Once logged in, the buyers all have the same wholesale pricing and there’s no overhead to managing custom wholesale pricing on a customer by customer basis.

3. Price Groups / Wholesale Pricing

You will need an app to provide real, usable B2B pricing to solve use cases where multiple business buyers need different prices for the same products / SKUs. Customer Pricing by Bold (a developer with more than a dozen proven Shopify plugins) is a great option for this requirement. This app will allow you to seamlessly use the same store to offer Wholesale B2B or Custom Pricing to premium customers (VIP, Gold, Silver, Platinum, etc.). As an admin you will need to create tags for specific groups of customers and set price levels for that customer group. When the customers log in, the app changes pricing automatically.”

There are additional functional add-ons with premier pricing that are essentially allowing more granular discount schedules and more complex pricing based on quantity and product variants. Learn more here.

4. Punch Out / Return Cart

Business customers want the ability to “punch out” of a purchasing system like procurement within ERP and buy on an e-commerce website. There are some developers and plugin apps that allow this within Shopify. Punch Out Cloud is an app that allows the start in a merchants purchasing system. Users then decide to make a purchase and find your offering via a logo or description of the product or service you provide. The user then starts the punchout connection and data is transferred to your punchout enabled catalog in Shopify. The Cart can then be returned to the ERP.

Other Shopify apps enable the user to provide custom quotes, provide freight quotes, provide professional invoices which many businesses / business buyers demand.

So you can accommodate a significant number of B2B use cases by using one or several plugins. But what’s the risk? Each app represents a possible point of failu...

If you haven’t yet registered for Adobe Summit 2021, you still can but you’d better hurry as it starts in a little over a week! North America sessions are primarily being conducted Tuesday, April 27 and Wednesday, April 28. For e-commerce merchants and their team members, the Commerce Track will provide some valuable sessions even if you’re not currently an Adobe customer. As we continue to navigate life in the time of Covid-19, this year’s conference is a great opportunity for startups, smaller companies, students and entrepreneurs to attend Adobe sessions that are typically held at the massive in-person events in Las Vegas, with a premium price tag. This year, all sessions are free of charge.

Don’t Miss These Sessions from the Adobe Summit Digital Commerce Track

It’s always hard to decide which sessions to attend, and often there are many at the same time that make the planning even more difficult. We’ve put together our list of recommended sessions for any of our clients or followers who wants to maximize the exiting 2-day event.

Adobe Summit Keynote – 12noon-1pm EDT

Shanatnu Narayen (CEO of Adobe) and Anil Charavarthy (GM / Digital) are both great, inspiring speakers and will emphasize the importance of getting your organization into the new era of marketing and commerce with real customer personalization. Be prepared to learn about the basics of customer experience management and the ADOBE tools that are used to achieve it.

Serena Williams is this year’s guest speaker for the keynote; We all know Serena the Professional Tennis player but she’s also a successful entrepreneur and has parlayed her personal brand into a great e-commerce brand as well.

Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, Rajesh Subramanium, COO of FEDEX and Deborah Wahl, CMO of General Motors will also be featured in the keynote. Definitely not to be missed!

Commerce Roadmap Updates – 2:30-3pm EDT

Another can’t miss session. Chris Hedge from the Adobe Magento product team will give a detailed update on what’s new and what’s coming from the Magento E-Commerce platform team.

For Magento merchants wanting to learn more about the value of integrations with other Adobe products like Sensei, Marketo and Business Intelligence (BI) tools – we’ll hear how products are becoming more integrated directly into the Magento platform, so they can be used without switching dashboards or logging into numerous apps.

We’ll also hear about new features that will be of particular interest to merchants looking to go headless and/or leverage the highly sophisticated set of B2B features that Magento offers.

Bringing the Showroom Experience to Digital Channels – 3-3:30 EDT

Chris Guerra from Blue Acorn and Sue Beckett from Adobe Commerce Cloud merchant, Lovesac, will provide a case study on how to consider the entire customer experience across channels and make it exceptional. Expect to hear about techniques from merchandising to messaging to personalization that all together make a great customer experience and one that can really differentiate your brand and help it to evolve beyond just a catalog and a cart.

Delivering a Best-in-Class Customer Experience: Dell- 5:30-6pm EDT

Join experts from Dell and WiPro Digital in a case study that will present how a number of Adobe technologies (both commerce and marketing automation) have been deployed to support an amazing customer experience for Dell customers. Even if its discussing an industry that’s very different than yours, we believe that this is going to be a super value session for e-commerce merchants looking to understand how to identify all of the aspects that can be weaved together to formulate a truly commerce-focused customer experience – from product merchandising to configuration to purchase to customer support all the way through the process.

Wednesday, April 28

Designing a One-of-a-Kind Experience With Melissa and Doug – 3-3:30EDT

We are really excited about this session for startup e-commerce merchants, including startups withi...