B2BWoo Review – A Complete Business to Business Platform
B2B eCommerce is a massive industry.
Peek inside this trillion-dollar industry and you will see tons of businesses operating in a variety of industries and niches.
Suffice to say that the industry is going one way: up! The nature of the business, the stakes involved, and the overall user experience of B2B sites has enabled it to overshadow its counterpart B2C.
You might read “overall user experience” and be confused as to why a generally traditional industry would have the need to provide their users with a good user experience.
Well, you have B2C and eCommerce platforms to thank for that.
Taking Cue from The B2C Experience
B2B purchasers are the ones who have jump started the change in the industry.
Having seen the engaging customer experiences on the B2C stores, they started demanding a better website experience from B2B store owners.
B2B store owners, for their part, answered the call and altered their stores to be more user-friendly as opposed to following traditional practices.
Most of the B2B stores nowadays are providing the same customer experience as a B2C store. This simplicity in making a customer-facing website for B2B is primarily attributed to eCommerce platforms.
The Rise of B2B Ecommerce Platforms
Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, and WooCommerce have contributed significantly to the rise of B2B platforms.
They’re easy to use, have plenty of templates available to create a stunning website, and are highly functional. By simply subscribing (in the case of WooCommerce, installing) to the platform, you can create a highly functional and aesthetically designed eCommerce store.
But while all of the platforms we’ve mentioned above are focused on developing both B2B and B2C websites, there are some that specifically focus on B2B eCommerce development.
This review is about one of those platforms: B2BWoo. A powerful B2B eCommerce platform developed by the B2B specialists at Codup, it’s packed with features and functionalities solely for wholesale purposes.
What is B2BWoo?
At its core, B2BWoo is a B2B plugin built on top of WooCommerce. While WooCommerce is sturdy enough to build a B2B store, it lacks the granular functions of the B2B trade.
B2BWoo helps fix that by introducing a variety of B2B-specific functionalities that makes your store wholesale friendly. From dynamic pricing, to customized catalogs, quote management, and more, the plugin is built for B2B in every manner possible.
Let’s look at the plugin and what makes it stand out as a B2B platform.
Simplify Your Wholesale Processes
Built with the ultimate goal of simplifying B2B purchases, B2BWoo is built for wholesale throughout. It utilizes the time-tested architecture of WooCommerce, and includes all the necessary B2B functionalities on your store.
At its core, B2BWoo helps you deliver a seamless B2B experience to your customers – allowing you to compete online without facing any inhibitions.
The plugin comes with a variety of handy B2B functionalities. Let’s look at some of them, shall we?
Wholesale Pricing Controls
B2BWoo offers a whole range of price controlling features that lets you customize your prices based on multiple metrics. The plugin allows you to:
- Show or hide prices at product level – Depending on your requirements, you can disable or enable product visibility for non-logged-in users. This allows only members to view your products.
- Dynamic pricing – Changes in prices based on seasonal and annual demands.
- Global level pricing – Set customized prices at all levels.
- Category level pricing – Set customized prices on different product categories.
- ● Pricing based on roles – Hide or show prices based on different user roles
…and more.
The power to set prices based on different metrics is the mainstay of B2B eCommerce. For its part, B2BWoo is a solution that gives you significant legroom in terms of managing your store’s prices.
Product Ordering Controls
The ability to control your order quantities is another important facet of B2B eCommerce. B2BWoo helps equip your store with the following product control functionalities.
- Min-Max order control – Allows you to set maximum and minimum order totals before letting a user make a purchase.
- Backordering – Functionalities for backordering.
- Product sampling options – Allowing customers to view samples of a product.
Quick Ordering and Product Table Functionalities
Perhaps the most redeeming feature of B2BWoo is the fact that it allows business owners to include a quick ordering functionality on their store.
With a quick ordering functionality at your disposal, your customers can order their frequently purchased products directly from a single table as opposed to visiting individual product pages.
B2BWoo takes this functionality one-step further by introducing Product Tables, a powerful functionality that lets you create a quick ordering table for your choice.
What’s the difference, you might ask?
Well, B2BWoo’s Quick Order functionality allows you to integrate a plug-and-play quick ordering table while Product Tables allows you to customize your quick order table depending on your requirements. All in all, these features of B2BWoo provides the following sub-functionalities:
- CSV product file upload
- Multiple order form support
- Category based order form
- RFQ (Request for Quote) Integration
- Gutenberg Compatible
…among others. All in all, this feature stands out as the best feature of B2BWoo.
Request for Quote
Standing true to its support for B2B eCommerce, B2BWoo’s most powerful feature is the request for quote functionality. Essentially overhauling the traditional “Add to Cart” button, the functionality adds a Request for Quote functionality that allows users to request quotes and negotiate pricing over particular products.
Ecommerce Content Management and Taxation Controls
B2BWoo comes equipped with a variety of eCommerce content management tools like the ability to show or hide content, create public or private stores, and create company hierarchies through the roles and permissions management functionalities of B2BWoo.
Moreover, the platform allows you significant control with regards to managing taxation. For example, if you want to display products on your store with or without tax, then you can do so with this B2B eCommerce platform.
Catalog Management Tools
B2BWoo provides significant tools for managing your B2B catalogs. This functionality allows you to create tailored catalogs you can display to specific users on your store. You can hide or show products based on those customer groups.
Corporate Account Management
To manage the multiple purchasing parties in your store, B2BWoo provides you with a Roles and Permissions management functionality. What it does is essentially allows purchasing companies on your store to simulate the hierarchies of their own company.
With such a B2B hierarchy created in the store, your B2B buyers can have an easier time restricting their purchasing practices to the higher-level members of their company’s official hierarchy.
Integrations:
B2BWoo comes with a wide range of integration options. With multiple integration partners like Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP, the platform offers smooth integration with a variety of different ERP, CRM, WHM and MIS systems. With B2BWoo, you don’t have to worry about integrations since it promises smooth back-office integrations regardless of the platform you’re using.
B2BWoo: The Downside?
When we first heard about a B2B platform built on top of the WooCommerce platform, we were a bit skeptical.
Scaling on WooCommerce has been a major criticism of the platform. While B2BWoo has almost everything you could ask for from a B2B store, it was, at the end of the day, built on WooCommerce. Would it be able to scale?
To get an answer, we reached out to Codup.co, the developers behind B2BWoo. Their answer was simple:
“Similar to how you would upgrade your Shopify or Magento subscription to scale your store, scaling with B2BWoo is the same. With the correct hosting platform, you can scale your B2BWoo-built store without worrying about whether or not it will scale. It will scale and help you grow your business through WooCommerce.”
Suffice to say that the answer was satisfying.
Final Words:
In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a rise in B2B stores on WooCommerce. To cater to the rise, we’ve also seen plenty of developers release plugins on the official WooCommerce Store.
But those were some minor extensions hosted on either the official store or on a third-party plugin site. B2BWoo, on the other hand, is a game changer in that scenario since it has everything that you need to create a B2B store.
Would we recommend B2BWoo for your store? Absolutely.
