Magento Open Source / Adobe Commerce have a lot of features to support B2B customer experience. If you are building a store, there are different ways you can approach it. The first question you need to answer is: Do you want your B2B customers to have a similar experience to B2C?
Single Storefront for B2B and B2C with Segmentation by Customer Group
This option can work well if you don’t want to provide a drastically different experience for B2B vs B2C customers. They all access the store from the same URL. Magento provides customer groups by default, which can be assigned to different tax classes and used to segment parts of the customer experience.
If you use Adobe Commerce (paid license) you can display different content blocks by customer group.
Some things to keep in mind if considering this strategy:
- Payment Methods can not be configured by customer group without customization
- Shipping Methods can not be configured by customer group without customization
- Showing a different product catalog by group can only be achieved with Adobe Commerce or customization of open source
- Anyone can view the catalog, generally you use a public price
Separate Storefronts for B2B and B2C
Magento Open Source includes the ability to set up numerous websites and stores under one installation. This option is useful when you want to provide a different experience for B2B vs B2C. It uses Magento Open Source out of the box features, so you can easily separate the product catalog and messaging without needing Adobe Commerce (paid license) features.
- Stores at separate locations. Example: domain.com and b2b.domain.com
- Easily maintain separate product catalogs.
- Optionally, keep the entire B2B storefront locked behind a login screen
- Different checkout experience for each storefront, with different payment and shipping methods
- Different theme or messaging by storefront
