eCommerce portals which can serve B2B Businesses are in demand now a days. Companies which want their distributors/wholesalers/dealers to access the parent company products/services with specific privileges, are often in need for an online portal to achieve this. Opencart being a popular open source eCommerce platform in the market is not lagging behind to provide an effective B2B experience through its specific features. Let’s see how an organization can achieve B2B eCommerce through OpenCart.
Here we are analyzing this process based on the default features offered by Opencart. Ofcourse features can be extended by customization [as Opencart is open source] or through extensions developed and offered by Opencart Partners.
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Customer Segregation
Categorize the registered customers within Opencart into different ‘Customer Groups’. You can create multiple customer groups such as ‘Wholesale’, ‘Retail’, ‘Unregistered’ etc. You can easily apply different rules on different customer groups once they are segregated. Some customer groups are generic in nature such as ‘Default’ and ‘Unregistered’.
Customer Group Specific Pricing
This is a very important feature for B2B. The first step is obviously the above mentioned Customer Group creation, this is the second step.
For Example –
iPAD 2 16GB Wifi has base price of 500 USD
- Wholesale Price 420 USD
- Dealer Price 400 USD
So if you have 3 Customer Groups, Default, Wholesale and Dealer, you can apply this customer group specific pricing easily in Opencart. Each Customer Group Customers when logged in can see different pricing and if not logged in then can see the base price
Show Price to Logged In Customers
This is the third step towards B2B. in first step you created customer groups, in second step you have assigned different pricing to different customer groups. But still any visitor comes to your website can see the base price of the product and when logged in can see a different price. For a true B2B Portal, it’s never wise to show the price. In Opencart you can set the feature to show prices only when the visitor logs in and only show product lists [without prices] to visitors.
Quantity Discounts
This is another B2B feature which you can use with Customer Groups. Attach quantity discounts on top of customer group specific price gives another advantage in your offering.
For Example –
iPAD 2 16GB Wifi has base price of 500 USD
- Default Price 500 USD, if purchased above quantity 5 then 10% discount
- Wholesale Price 420 USD, if purchased above 10 then 15% discount
- Dealer Price 400 USD, if purchased above 10 then 18% discount
So as you can see you can create and apply such rules from Opencart Admin Panel.
In this way you can achieve a basic B2B Portal features through Opencart.
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