Magento 2 B2B in 2017: Feature Overview

As you have noticed B2B is a hot topic right now. I visited IRCE Chicago, RBTE London, various meetups and countless customer meetings where B2B was brought up a lot, featured heavily or at least used as a buzzword.

Some even predict that B2B e-commerce will hit $12 trillion in sales worldwide by 2020, up from $5.5 trillion in 2012. Numbers could be inflated, god knows how calculated or not necessarily mean anything to you, however, B2B is suddenly getting a lot of traction — ORO CRM came up with brand new product called OroCommerce: Open Source B2B eCommerce Platform and rebranded themselves as ORO INC, Magento released B2B module for their EE RC build and some of our partners are telling that most of their business now consists of new B2B website builds as well as our current B2C clients are adding new channel (guess which? Yes, B2B).

To be honest, B2B has been outdated for far too long and I still get emails like “we do everything via Phone, Paper and Fax POs”, in IRCE we even met company providing service which creates order in ERP/CRM systems from email (PO), they reported that AI is involved to recognise and map data correctly. Such a startup would not live if we would have proper B2B tools & setup.

Anyways, Magento is finally addressing B2B demand in their latest RC build. So far they haven’t released many new features because they been busy building and patching latest M2 while Shopify added many new features for Social commerce, SalesForce Commerce Cloud has Einstein search, ORO released brand new product and seemingly everyone got few steps ahead, therefore, Magento is hungry to catch up and invited their partners to test and take a look at B2B module within 2.2 RC.

Magento 2 B2B module features review

Magento B2B module consists of multiple smaller modules with cross dependencies on each other. The B2B module is the base module for the whole B2B also providing several B2B branding elements e.g. adding a link to B2B customer support in Admin. Fun fact: “If you want to evaluate the new B2B module, you must install it when you install EE itself. The B2B module is only available for Magento EE v2.2.0.” — I missed this sentence and lost a couple of hours of debugging and googling why it ain’t working.

The full list on today is:

B2B
BundleNegotiableQuote
BundleRequisitionList
BundleSharedCatalog
Company
CompanyCredit
CompanyPayment
ConfigurableNegotiableQuote
ConfigurableRequisitionList
ConfigurableSharedCatalog
GiftCardNegotiableQuote
GiftCardRequisitionList
GiftCardSharedCatalog
GroupedRequisitionList
GroupedSharedCatalog
NegotiableQuote
NegotiableQuoteSharedCatalog
QuickOrder
RequisitionListSharedCatalog

Magento 2 B2B – What’s new in Back End?

Under Stores > Configuration > General we have new section “B2B features”

By default, B2B is turned off and if we have to enable it to see more options:

By “Enabling Company” we see more options & configurations

Magento 2 B2B – What’s new in Front End?

On the top navigation, we have “Quick order” link

Opening “Create an Account” we are given new option to create account on the behalf of the company

Also clearly visible on Sign in page

Comparing with standard Magento EE there are no such options

Comparing Customer Account after suicidally logging in. You will find there new sections such as My Requisition Lists and Company Structure

Magento 2 B2B Modules

Company, Company structure, Credit & Payment

The Magento_Company module allows a merchant to create a company account and assign multiple members of the company to the account. New Company account registration.

A merchant can only view the list of company members in Admin as well as view and manage company profiles in Admin. A company’s status controls what kind of access the company members have to the website. An admin user can also configure company-level emails and allow or disallow a company registration from the storefront. Also, this module adds a ‘customer type’ attribute to the customer in Admin: individual user, company member or company admin.

Company Credit settings

Advanced Settings for Company

Company Structure, adding new users or teams

The module also implements roles and permissions for the company members. The company admin builds a hierarchical company structure (which consists of teams and users) in the storefront and assigns roles and permissions to the company members. This hierarchy allows the company admin to control user activity within the account. This hierarchy as well as roles and permissions are currently available in the storefront only.

Company Users

Quick order module

The Magento_QuickOrder module allows customers to improve their user experience by creating a new order from a list of multiple SKUs. Multiple items can be sent to the shopping cart from a CSV file, by copy and pasting multiple SKUs from another source, or by manually entering SKUs one-by-one into the Quick Order form. This feature is available for both logged-in users and guests.

Requisition List module

The Magento_RequisitionList module allows a customer to create multiple lists of frequently-purchased items and use those lists for order placement. This feature is available for both logged-in users and guests.

RequisitionList functionality is similiar to wish lists, but it has the following differences:

A requisition list is not purged after sending items to the shopping cart. It can be used to place multiple orders
The UI for requisition lists has been modified to a compact view in order to display large number of items.

The merchant can configure maximum number of requisition lists per customer which was set to 999 by default

Custom pricing / shared catalogues

The Magento_SharedCatalog modules defines the visibility of products as well as product prices in the catalog and in B2B quotes for different company accounts. The module allows a merchant to create multiple shared catalogs, link them to one or more company accounts, and set different product prices.

Shared catalogs also control the visibility of products and categories for a company in the storefront. The shared catalog type (public or custom) defines the scope of products and prices available for guest users vs logged-in users.

The system can have only one public and any number of custom shared catalogs. The module relies on the CatalogPermissions module, in that the visibility of categories for a customer group is defined by category permissions for this customer group. Once a shared catalog is enabled in B2B features, the category permissions are automatically enabled.

Adding a product or a category to a shared catalog enables appropriate category permissions for the customer groups linked to this shared catalog. The module provides web APIs and can be integrated with third-party solutions to manage shared catalogs in Magento.

Quotation engine

The Magento_NegotiableQuote module allows a customer and a merchant (admin user) to negotiate product and/or shipping prices before the customer places an order. Its functionality is available for the company members only. Currently, B2B quoting is global–the price is given for the quote as a whole. Quoting per item is not supported.

The quote lifecycle is managed via quote statuses

The quoting interface allows both a merchant and a customer to manage items in the quote (add, delete, change quantity) as well as make an offer (or request a quote) for items and/or for shipping. The negotiated price set in the negotiable quote is exactly the price that will be applied on a quote during checkout, order generation, and invoice generation.

The module provides a set of configurations for the quoting feature, such as the ability to request a quote, configure the minimum quote amount, configure the default expiration period, configure attached files, and set email templates for quotes.

The module provides web APIs and can be integrated with 3rd party solutions to manage negotiable quote in Magento.

Note: You can find module descriptions also directly on Magento docs where from some of above descriptions come from