B2B is becoming a hot trend in the eCommerce business world. A lot of businesses choose to transform their eCommerce website (or stores) to meet the demand of B2B transactions and B2B customers. Magento merchants are not exceptions. Although Magento community edition provides the business runners with various features to support their selling activities and business management, this version has a lot of limits in B2B features. Therefore, the businesses need to find some ways to turn on B2B in Magento Community Edition to run B2B businesses.
Easiest Ways To Turn On B2B In Magento Community Edition
Upgrade Magento Commerce
The first approach that you may think about at first is upgrading from Magento Community Edition to Magento Commerce. Magento Commerce offers various functions to help the business runners manage their business, selling products, inventory, etc.; with the logins of thousands of staff to participate in the operation. This upgrade process needs the participation of technical professionals as Magento always requires coding change from the backend. Therefore, if you don’t have an IT team to conduct this task, you may need to hire third-party agencies to avoid mistakes.
Firstly, you need to go to the Magento Administration to get your authentication keys. Secondly, you need to finish all the prerequisites to set up your environment for the upgrade; including Verify Elasticsearch is installed, set limit for the webserver user and a checklist. Then, you can go straight to the Magento Commerce upgrade by following three steps:
- At the Magento Administration area, login as an administrator
- Click the System and then click Web Setup Wizard
- Choose System Upgrade and then select Yes for confirmation.
Magento will look for all the components of your web to conduct upgrades. You need to go through the drop-down list to find and click to the Magento Commerce version that you want to achieve.
Utilize Extensions
While Magento community edition is unable to provide enough B2B features for you to run a B2B business; you can add each feature (which you need) from Magento extensions on Magento marketplace. For example, if you need a simple and short order process, you can add Order fulfillment automation extensions, Quick order extensions, and payment extensions to reduce the complexity and ensure a smooth process when placing orders.
Take Advantage Of B2B Platform
However, installing separate Magento extensions requires your stores to sacrifice smooth and high-speed web performance as Magento is not a headless platform. Therefore, adding as many extensions as needed is not a good choice. The business runners may need an extension which can cover all the B2B features and support your Magento stores during operating B2B business. If you are still concerned which platform can handle, the B2B platform from GritGlobal can be super helpful. This platform can bring you a wide range of B2B features from quick order, bulk order, B2B account, B2B product catalog, and so on. Then, you do not need any additional extensions which can worsen your web performance.
Conclusion
We have suggested some ways to activate B2B features for Magento Community Edition merchants. We hope that you can get the points and have the most suitable approach to conduct the upgrade effortlessly.
