PrestaShop B2B Platform - 18 Features to Boost Your Sales

PrestaShop is not just a platform for building stores for individual customers. It also works as a great tool for B2B e-commerce. In today’s article, I will tell you how you can improve your sales with the Prestashop B2B platform.

Product pricing visibility

In contrast to traditional B2C sales, in the B2B segment, you typically do not want non-registered users to be able to see the prices of your products. It is possible to display prices only to those entities that have created an account in your store.

B2B customer registration and verification

When you have a mechanism in place to approve a customer’s registration, the store administrator (which can be you or your employee) must verify and accept the account creation of the person. In other words, you need to give consent to purchases in your store. Often, additional documents are required in the registration form to authenticate the company. You can automate the first customer verification by asking them to provide their company’s tax identification number in the registration form. Then, you have the option to check if such a company exists. 

Verification can also help you obtain the company’s data from the registry and make it easier for the user to register.

Returning customers

In a B2B store, it’s worth implementing certain sales mechanisms that are not present in a regular B2C store. During purchases in a regular B2C store, sales are cart-based. In B2B sales, we often deal with returning customers. For example, a domestic producer or distributor of a range of products who has smaller distributors under them may want to make purchases in your store. In such a situation, the returning customer will not read the product description again. They want to quickly order products that they are already familiar with. One of the mechanisms that can be used with the Prestashop B2B platform is the wholesale product order form, in which:

• the customer can quickly find the product by entering the reference number or SKU,
• then, by pressing ENTER, they can add another item to the order,
• enter the quantity they want to order in the window next to it,
• create another row, and so on until the order is complete.

Repeating orders in the B2B platform

An important aspect is the ability of your customer to reorder the same shopping cart of products. In this case, a functionality allowing your customer to access their last order and select the items they wish to reorder is necessary. They can also submit the same order again, by removing the items they no longer need and adding new products to the order.

Visible net and gross prices

It’s important in B2B to show not only the gross price of the product but also the net price and to demonstrate to the customer what discounts they can get in the individual product categories. One way to address this need is to create a single card in My Account. On this card, you display the product categories from the store and the percentage of discount that the customer has for a given category of products.

Cyclical shopping with Prestashop B2B

It’s very useful to offer customers the option of making cyclical orders. For example, if a customer wants to order the same products every month, you can allow them to do so by setting up an automatic order. The monthly orders will continue until the customer cancels the subscription.

Automated minimum inventory levels

You can give your customers the option of maintaining minimum stock levels in their warehouses. This option would require a custom implementation where your customer’s system could automatically communicate with your store and order products to maintain the minimum levels set in their warehouse.

Clear presentation of data

Another useful feature of a B2B store is the ability to display various product options in a table format. This is particularly attractive when dealing with complex sales as it presents the data in a clear and easy-to-understand manner.

Request for quotation

A convenient feature for your customers would be the ability to send a request for a quotation. Customers can select the products they want to buy and send a list to you requesting the total cost, hoping to receive a discount. This feature is useful in situations such as public procurement procedures where a company or institution needs to send an official request to several suppliers and compare their responses before selecting one to work with. By having this functionality in your store, you can facilitate the process for all potential buyers.

Dropshipping with the Prestashop platform

If you are a domestic distributor or manufacturer, you may want to offer your product catalog to another store. This is commonly referred to as drop shipping. It doesn’t have to be a broad definition of drop shipping. Sometimes, a simple XML or CSV file with a catalog of all products links to images, and the ability to download them wholesale is enough.

Another way to implement this type of functionality is for customers to be able to access “My Orders” in their panel and download a CSV file with the list of products and parameters included in the order. This makes it easier for distributors, especially smaller ones, to distribute goods to their accounting programs. 

With CSV files opened in Excel, data can be easily copied, and it is much faster than copying data from a PDF or invoice.

EDI++ Invoices

It is worth considering whether the store or software that is next to the store, used for issuing invoices, allows for issuing invoices in the EDI++ format or another standardized format. Why? This way, your recipients could easily import them as their cost documents.

Product Quantity in Stock

In the B2B segment, it is important to know how much of a given product the supplier has in stock. So, present on the product card or the list of products in a wholesale order, how many units of the given product are currently available in your store’s warehouse. This way, your recipient will know what to expect. Sometimes, such mechanisms are even made available that allow recipients to retrieve inventory levels from the store. They can then add their inventory levels to the level provided by the store, and the product availability is automatically synchronized.

PDF download option 

Additionally, you can consider equipping product cards with technical parameters. That is, the product card provides the ability to download a PDF with information about the product, which the customer can attach to their offer. We implemented this for one of our clients, where our client’s distributors could log into the store and add products to the cart. Later, we created a mechanism for creating offers for their clients. So, from the Prestashop B2B platform of the main distributor, partners could decide how much markup they have above their prices already after the discounts that the distributor provided them, and they could create offers with their logo and branding for their end customer. Preparing an offer in this way was simply faster and easier. Imagine how many partners would prefer this form of cooperation.

Product Price Dependent on Quantity and Order Value

You can make product prices dependent on the quantity ordered. For example, when ordering 2 units of a product, you provide a 10% discount, and when ordering 10 units, you give a 20% discount. Sometimes customers have multiple employees who order from one store, and this situation can also be taken into account when calculating discounts.

Same Day Shipping

Another option that Prestashop B2B offers is to give your customers the ability to have products ordered by noon and shipped the same day. This way, when a customer places multiple orders, it is better to combine them into one at noon and ship them as one package. So, it is passed to the logistics system as one order. This will lower transportation costs, make packing easier, and speed up delivery times. This will be beneficial for your customer, but also for your logistics department, which can handle most orders before noon.

Sales summary in your Prestashop B2B store

Summarizing the turnover in your Prestashop B2B store your customers can also see their monthly/yearly turnover with your company, giving you a basis for creating future discount systems, compensation, or rewards. For example, if a customer makes a yearly turnover of 1 million PLN, they can receive a reward or reach a higher discount threshold. This motivates them to increase purchases and increases loyalty to your B2B customer.

Currency and language change

It’s also worth considering sales in different currencies. Since you may have customers from different countries buying in different currencies, it’s good to have the ability to change both currency and language in your store for international sales.

Different product visibility for different customer groups

Not all products available for B2B are available in the same store for B2C. PrestaShop allows limiting the visibility of certain products to specific customer groups, such as B2B customers. This allows B2B customers to see product offerings not visible to B2C customers.

Summary – Prestashop B2B platform

All of these mechanisms can be implemented in various ways. PrestaShop provides basic functionality and extensions that are readily available in the market. This makes implementation easier, faster, and cost-effective. You can create many conveniences for yourself and your customers to ensure that your common interests run smoothly and conveniently.

So why not take advantage of the possibilities offered by the PrestaShop B2B platform for your business?