According to Statista, global B2B sales are expected to exceed 1.8 trillion dollars in 2023

The data indicates that by 2023, B2B sales will have skyrocketed. Any wholesaler intending to exploit this upsurge needs a robust B2B online platform in place. Using a B2B platform, wholesalers can increase the visibility of their products, streamline their business operations, and expand their possibilities for revenue. The ability to view, verify, and check-out your merchandise at speed might help attract online customers to your business.

If you search for the best B2B platforms online, there’ll be a lot of recommendations. How do you find one that is more pertinent to your company’s requirements? That’s where we can help.

All you need is a great understanding of the platform’s features, functions, and costs to make a profound decision. In this blog, we’ve included all the advisory steps you need to proceed wisely. Here, you’ll find the four most popular B2B wholesale platforms of 2023, their features, their benefits, their prices, and how to choose one for you.

Take a look at the four B2B platforms that the best Seattle eCommerce development team suggests.

Must-have features on a B2B eCommerce platform

To make your decision-making simpler, it is critical to first comprehend the fundamental yet crucial features and functionalities of any widely used B2B eCom platforms.

1.Account Onboarding

This is a key component of a wholesaler platform to distinguish B2B clients. Each customer has a unique set of requirements and managing all at once is difficult. This feature helps to segment wholesale customers into specific groups or profiles their order volume, catalog preference, frequency of reorders, and product quantity. A B2B marketplace’s ability to categorize clients will make it simple, and easy for wholesalers to prioritize customer demand.

2.Request a Quote

The price of a product in a business-to-business depends on several variables, including the product configuration, quantity, particular customer or customer group, delivery schedule, and more. Oftentimes, potential customers choose to inquire via call, or request a quote to discuss, review, and order the product they are interested in buying. By creating a seamless two-way link between the buyer and seller, this suggested feature from our Seattle eCommerce development professionals can help to a B2B to improve their customer communication.

3.Pricing Strategy

Pricing strategy is quite intricate in a B2B business model. Prices depend on a number of variables, including the volume of purchases, pre-negotiated discounts, frequency of purchases, and many more. This tool helps B2B wholesalers to develop and personalize unique pricing strategies for each client, organization, or business unit inclined to make a buy from them.

4.Real-time Inventory

This is another significant feature for B2B wholesalers to reduce the possibility of overselling inventory and disappointing potential customers. Real-time data keeps them informed about inventory levels and helps to efficiently streamline various warehouse activities. Real-time warehouse visibility features can be an immense help in efficiently managing B2B client demand.

5.Bulk Orders  

The bulk order feature is another helpful feature for wholesalers to balance the fine line of profitability while selling goods in bulk and at a discounted price. The feature allows wholesalers to quickly develop discount templates and save them for usage with different customer groups. When customers purchase any product in sets, bundles, or just a collection, they can leverage discounts based on their volume. This functionality helps to simplify bulk purchases in a business-to-business marketplace.

6.Catalog Management 

Customer catalog management is yet another crucial component of B2B eCommerce. This top feature pick from our Seattle-based eCommerce developers can help B2B marketplaces to improve their shopping experience for customers. It allows wholesalers to create distinct categories and hide/show products based on user preferences. It enables customized product displays that are solely based on B2B user group preferences. This functionality granulates the B2B activities when combined with personalized pricing.

Best B2B Wholesale Platforms

Check out the four most popular yet recommended B2B platforms for wholesalers in 2023.

#1 Shopify Plus 

One of the best-known and most successful e-commerce platforms is Shopify Plus. When it comes to high-end B2B ecommerce solutions, nothing beats Shopify’s innovative service for providing a fantastic user experience. It’s not surprising that well-known companies like Tesla, Motorola, and Adidas use Shopify Plus for B2B selling. This business has a track record of providing the best B2B sales, exceptional features, and excellent customer service. In fact, Shopify currently powered nearly a million B2B online stores Plus!

With Shopify Plus’, you can effortlessly add wholesale ecommerce channels to your website. Shopify’s extendable nature allows you to almost access any feature you might need, from new payment choices to order quantity tracking.

Outstanding features

• Launch multiple websites from the same backend 
• Advanced custom pricing 
• Thousands of integrated apps
• Sell to everyone, everywhere, and across multiple channels
• Manage everything through a single dashboard 
• Grow your audience with content marketing and SEO tools 
• Built-in blogs to attract customers 
• Insightful reports to track campaign performance
• Fully edit HTML and CSS
• Flexible shipping rates and free shipping 
• Integrate with over 100 payment gateways 
• Create accounts at checkout
• Fulfill one or multiple orders with one click
• Customizable automated store emails with any design
• Social media integration 
• Build a multi-lingual website 

Pros and Cons of Shopify

Pros

• Easy and flexible to use
• Affordable pricing
• Huge collection of apps and beautiful storefront themes
• Flexible sales online and offline with comprehensive Point of Sale (POS) options & hardware 
• Assign attribute sales to specific staff 

Cons

• Limited functionality for extensive growth (unless you upgrade to Shopify Plus)
• Most apps are not free
• Built-in SEO tools are ‘good enough’. Must install apps for extended features
• Requires high costs when switching to self-hosted setup 
• AMP is only available if you install a paid app

Shopify Plus Pricing

• Basic Shopify: $29/month
• Shopify: $79/month
• Advanced: $299/month 
• Shopify Plus: Contact for a quote

Who should use Shopify?
Shopify is the most easy-to-use eCommerce platform for both small and large B2B businesses because it provides essential tools to build a well-functioning and beautiful website. However, if you need a website capable of handling many wholesale products, you might consider Shopify Plus.

#2 Magento Commerce

The top open-source B2B eCommerce platform, Magento, is scalable for any business and has amazing features. Magento Commerce is a premium version of Magento Open-source that speeds up your business in the current eCommerce environment with its intuitive built-in features from Magento 2. Magento’s simplicity makes it possible to create websites with appealing designs and editable content layouts writing no code.

Magento Commerce offers you greater capabilities compared to free Magento Open source, including advanced marketing options, customer incentive programmes, and targeted promotions. By establishing seamless cross-channel experiences, large wholesale enterprises with many items, brands, shops, and warehouses can make the most of Magento Order Management.

Outstanding features

• Build webpages with in-line editing and powerful content tools
• Quickly add products to content pages
• Custom category pages for easier product discovery
• Increase engagement and boost conversion rate on mobile & desktop 
• Product recommendations for more relevant experiences
• Seamlessly integrated with Amazon to grow revenue
• Inventory management
• Listing management
• Fulfillment management

Pros and Cons of Magento Commerce

Pros

• Provide more functionalities for modern eCommerce growth
• Scalability to scale up with large B2B businesses
• Flexible customization
• A huge community of users and developers for support

Cons

• Automatically update the plan if the sales exceed the limit
• Not powerful enough for content editing
• Tough pricing
• Requires high costs when switching to self-hosted setup

Magento Commerce is expensive
It’s hard to find authentic and highly qualified Magento developers
Product support is quite pricey
Limited B2B sales features
Pricing

• Magento Community: Free
• Magento Enterprise: Start at $22,000/year
• Magento Commerce Cloud: Start at $2000/year (includes hosting)

Who should use Magento Commerce?
Wholesale businesses with a large volume of sales can outgrow with Magento Commerce. If you have a low budget, consider other options.

#3 BigCommerce

Bigcommerce is another fantastic solution for B2B eCommerce wholesale. It is recognized as the world’s top cloud eCommerce platform. The platform provides a variety of features and solutions aimed at building a robust and fast eCommerce website. It enables wholesalers to create API-driven and high-touch experiences through your CMS, DXP, application, device, or customized front-end.

The platform allows you to provide a speedy checkout to consumers while ensuring a flawless shopping experience for yourself with its robust tool plugs and engines. It’s easy to create differentiated mobile-responsive offerings from the homepage to the checkout page. Since PCI compliance has already been established, the sensitive data from your online store and your customers is safe from malicious intrusions.

Outstanding features

• Easily edit site pages without coding required
• Mobile optimization
• Multiple fully customizable themes with built-in HTML, CSS, and Javascript
• Build your site with WordPress integration
• Support B2B specific payment services
• Build responsive and beautiful storefront
• Mobile optimization
• Sell across channels
• Segment Customer Groups
• SEO-friendly URL and out-of-the-box metadata
• Discount coupon & gift vouchers
• Automated emails to avoid abandoned carts

Pros and Cons of Bigcommerce

Pros

• Easy and flexible to add unlimited product variants
• Scalable for different business types
• No transaction fees
• SEO friendly

Cons

• Automatically update the plan if the sales exceed the limit
• Not powerful enough for content editing
• Tough pricing
• Requires high costs when switching to self-hosted setup

Pricing

• Standard: $25.95/month
• Plus: $79.95/month
• Pro: $299.95/month
• Enterprise: Contact sales or call for custom pricing

Who should use Bigcommerce?
Both small and large B2B wholesale businesses can leverage the power of BigCommerce. It offers various features for all-level projects. However, BigCommerce is best for large or fast-growing businesses.

#4 Woocommerce

WooCommerce is another well-known open-source eCommerce platform on our list. This flexible and user-friendly platform was developed using WordPress, making it simple for users to optimize content for their websites. WordPress experts in particular, who are already familiar with WordPress, can easily and rapidly develop a website.

WooCommerce offers a wealth of great plugins and templates that let non-technical people create completely functional B2B websites. It support you with a variety of performance optimization tools from the very beginning of website development that will help your website rank higher and draw in more visitors.

Outstanding features

• Wide range of extensions and add-ons
• Wholesale-friendly
• SEO-friendly design
• Work out-of-the-box with WordPress
• Secure payment and configurable shipping options
• Fully integrate with various official intuitive extensions
• Great scalability and virtually integrated with any service
• Fast-growing community

Pros and Cons of WooCommerce

Pros

• Free and open source
• Thousands of customizable themes
• Flexible configuration to sell any kind of product
• Optimal cybersecurity
• Full control of content and store
• Extensive range of plugins

Cons

• Require users some knowledge of WordPress and WooCommerce
• Many paid extensions
• Difficult for non-tech savvy to build a robust site
• WooCommerce doesn’t meet WordPress updates well
• Hard to implement multi-currency
• No multilingual functionality

Pricing

• Basic Site: Free
• Mid-Range Site:
• Advanced Site: $35-129 professional theme

Who should use WooCommerce?
WooCommerce gives users essential features to build a standard eCommerce website like inventory management, shipping costs, tax calculation, and payment options. Therefore, wholesale businesses of all sizes can leverage this platform. When combined with other extensions and new functionality added, WooCommerce users can create a powerful website for larger businesses.

Conclusion

You understand the essential functions of a B2B eCommerce wholesale platform. So, how to choose one that you’ll not regret later?

Contact RoryMartin.com today →