The vast majority of transactions in our economy take place between companies. Companies selling goods to other companies. But while B2C businesses have been investing heavily in digital commerce since the late 1990s, we see a lot of potential and untapped opportunities in B2B e-commerce. While some may already have a way to buy products online, most don't offer anything close to what customers are starting to expect in the B2B environment. In this blog post, I will show how Shopware as an e-commerce system can help merchants to meet the growing needs of their B2B customers.
Typically, in B2B e-commerce environments, a lot is tailored to the specific needs of the business and its customers. Starting with products, most companies often have a rather complex product structure with different product lifecycles, many properties, fact sheets and attachments as well as variant structures or even configurable products. This data usually lives in the ERP system, but the very first challenge is usually to help companies cleanse and enrich their product data, especially if the company supports multiple languages, as is common in Switzerland. For data enrichment and data quality management, a Product Information Management (PIM) system like Pimcore can even come in handy.
Shopware, with its strong APIs, allows us to implement the best fitting option that works best for the business needs. Sometimes the data comes from the ERP itself and is enriched in Shopware, sometimes all the data is in the ERP and sometimes there is a PIM system; all this is easily done with Shopware and the flexibility is a key strength of Shopware.
Other data flows like sending orders back to the ERP, getting real time stock data from a warehouse system or getting a customer specific price from some pricing API (e.g. from the ERP) can be set up and integrated nicely into Shopware with its modular approach using Shopware extensions.
The way Shopware is structured out of the box, with the possibility of different sales channels, multi-language ready by default, the powerful rule builder and flow builder as well as good options to configure the system come in very handy. This allows merchants to customize the system without having to start doing big individual developments, but rather well separated extensions that add some parts to the Shopware. With this approach, merchants can easily keep up to date with the latest Shopware developments and the system remains maintainable and scalable for future growth.
In addition to the strong foundation of the Shopware core system, the Shopware B2B components allow merchants to cover a lot and meet the expectations of their customers.
In the B2B environment, there are usually different users buying for the same customer. These customers may have different roles and different budget approvals, but it is still the same company ordering. That's where Shopware's Employee Management comes in, allowing customers to do just that: Add and manage employees, add and manage different roles with different permissions. This is a big step from a simple shop to place an order to a valuable customer portal that adds real value to the customer relationship.
Some other features that are often required in the B2B context are quote management, the ability to have a CSV upload that creates an order or fills the basket with products, or even spare parts management. These features can be implemented and extended as required.
In summary, the requirements of B2B e-commerce are very different from those of 'normal' B2C shops. And no matter what stage of B2B e-commerce readiness a merchant is at, Shopware offers all the flexibility needed to meet the growing demands of B2B customers, and even comes with powerful B2B tools called B2B Components that increase the speed of implementation. That's why we love using Shopware.
