Investigating Magento for pure B2B

Question

I'm investigating platforms for a pure B2B business. I've looked at Magento and I have a couple of issues that seems to be without solution as the platform sits now.

• In our business we have may different price lists, in two categories. Normal price lists per market, and customer specific price lists.

• We also have customer specific products, that's unique for the customer that we hold in stock. (Should only be shown for the specific customer/customers)

• In many cases our customers has one company, but regional offices. Each of these regions have their own customer number, the same organisation-number, but different delivery addresses and sometimes even different invoice addresses.

• There are sometimes multiple contact persons for each region that shop online with us. And there are also cases where the same contact person are connected to two different regions... and in a few cases even different companies with their own customer id.

Ex.

Company 1 INC in region x

• Contact person 1

• Contact person 2

Company 1 INC in region y

• Contact person 3

• Contact person 1

Company 2 INC in region a

• Contact person 4

• Contact person 2

Worth mentioning is that our business system is the core in our business. The e-commerce platform is the external face for our customers.

Answer 1

It works like this, to do what you want will likely be low $10s thousands. Magento natively is a SME platform for B2C - the things you want to do are possible but will require changes to make them work.

The key is how the changes are made. As Magento is a technical platform everyone will code their way around it, this in the medium to long term can cause stability and upgrade issues along with being bound to programmers for updates. You can also solve the problems with business processes, or the way we prefer, combining both technology and business processes.

You have solutions such as Hybris ($100s thousands) or ATG ($millions) which are more fully featured so it depends on your budget. In the end Magento is the best platform for the level it is, but you need to be careful how you implement it with unique business requirements like these. Yes it is all possible - but not out of the box.