When you are all set to start selling online, as a B2B retailer, the essential aspect that comes your way is choosing the best B2B ecommerce platform for your B2B business.
There are a variety of B2B ecommerce platforms available in the market (see: top ecommerce platforms in India), but making the right choice is tough, especially when they all appear the same.
In this article, we will discuss the 9 best B2B ecommerce platforms that retailers and new businesses can rely upon.
We will also compare each of the platforms and try to figure out which one fits your needs.
The best B2B ecommerce platforms are:
- B2B Ecommerce Platform #1- OpenCart
- B2B Ecommerce Platform #2- Squarespace
- B2B Ecommerce Platform #3- 3dcart
- B2B Ecommerce Platform #4- Jimdo
- B2B Ecommerce Platform #5- Shopify
- B2B Ecommerce Platform #6- WooCommerce
- B2B Ecommerce Platform #7- Wix
- B2B Ecommerce Platform #8- Weebly
- B2B Ecommerce Platform #9- BigCommerce
- B2B Ecommerce Platform #10- Magento
- Best B2B Ecommerce Platforms Comparison Table
- Conclusion
B2B Ecommerce Platform #1- OpenCart
OpenCart is powering 924,220 websites, as of January 2020. It includes the world’s many renowned companies like BrishRedCross, Concordia College, FX Creations, etc.
Top Features
Templates: OpenCart features a massive collection of themes to offer the best fit for your online store. They are all available at a fair price, and many of them are offered free. Themes are designed to look professional and appealing.
Add-ons: The platform boasts a huge range of add-ons available under different categories, including market places and modules. These extensions were developed by OpenCart Partners or Developers. Several of these extensions are available for free.
SEO: You can use SEO URLs for the products, category, manufacturer, and information pages, as per the SEO documentation. Each SEO keyword has to be defined per sales items, division, manufacturer, and product description page, stored in a database table.
Customer support: OpenCart provides answers to many queries users usually have through the documentation. If your query is not addressed there, you can open a support ticket, and the dedicated team will get in touch with you. Apart from that, community support and dedicated technical support is also there.
Sales Features: Get an extensive set of reports and metrics to know the health of your site. Apart from the most common shipping methods provided by all major e-commerce sites, you can use your national postal system. It also supports FedEx, UPS, and others.
Pricing: OpenCart is free and is open-source. Free trials are also available before you choose it for your online store. However, you will have to pay for the downloaded extensions.
Why Do Users Love OpenCart?
- You can get the complete and important information you are most interested in, like total orders, sales, customers, people online, sales analytics, etc.
- It enables you to manage multiple stores from one admin interface.
- The guidance provided to the new users with the documentation and other supports is incredible.
B2B Ecommerce Platform #2- Squarespace
The popularity of Squarespace is rising ever since it embarked into the market.
By January 2020, this feature-packed platform has a total of 981,789 live sites and is powering 3,681,746 websites.
Top Features
Templates: For an online store, Squarespace boasts the best templates designs for your online store. Each design is visually appealing and comes with a product page available in three styles – Classic, Advanced, or Unique. Besides, it includes a vast range of industries and products, something for everyone.
Add-ons: Squarespace commerce comes with third-party extensions to extend the abilities of your online store. You can find these extensions under different categories like shipping and fulfillment, finance, inventory and products, and sales and marketing. The extension page has been made more useful by adding all the basic to advance level FAQs related to extensions.
SEO: Squarespace offers built-in search engine optimization features of best practices to boost your visibility in the search engine results. If you want a site-specific SEO strategy, you can take the help of a top-level SEO checklist provided by the site to get started.
Customer support: Squarespace offers its customers a 24/7 support system over email and twitter. In case of urgent need, there is an option of chat from 4:00 AM to 8:00 PM Eastern Time, Monday through Friday.
Sales Features: With Squarespace, you are granted an enormous amount of products to showcase through your online store, so hypothetically, you can sell endless products. Automatic emailing is a fantastic feature to earn the customer’s trust. Squarespace sends “thanks for your purchase” emails out for you automatically to confirm your shoppers of their purchase. You can create tax rules for the countries, states, provinces, and even ZIP Codes of the places where you ship products, using a feature called configuring sales taxes.
Pricing: Squarespace has a total of four pricing plans to offer.
- Personal – $16/month
- Business – $26/month
- Basic Commerce – $30/month
- Advance Commerce – $46/month
You can save by choosing the annual plans. If you get an annual Personal and annual Business plan, you can get up to 25% and 30% off, respectively.
Similarly, buy the annual Basic Commerce plan and Advance commerce plan, get a 13% discount.
In all the plans, few of the benefits are common like free custom domain, SSL security, SEO features for site visibility, templates, contributors, mobile optimization, 24/7 customer support, basic website metrics, and Squarespace extensions.
Why Do Users Love Squarespace?
- Squarespace is popular for its sleek, visual templates to emphasis on your products.
- There is an ease of customization, which means you can tweak any layout to match your brand.
- Its inventory system and analytical tools are excellent.
- It enables you to create tax rules for the countries, states, provinces, and even ZIP Codes for your required shipping places.
- Automatic emails are sent from your end to the shopper to confirm their shopping.
B2B Ecommerce Platform #3- 3dcart
3dcart is a leading eCommerce platform that has been growing since 1997 to keep up with the changing market.
It powers tens of thousands of online stores, including B2B sellers. 3dcart has a big focus on scalability to work with any size of business in any industry.
Top Features
Templates: 3dcart has some of the best templates available. There is a wide variety of designs, and all can be customized with intuitive tools. However one of the biggest advantages of 3dcart templates is the technology behind them. Using Bootstrap as a base, 3dcart developed its Core Template Engine to bring built-in SEO, Google AMP, optimized code, responsive design, and more to all its templates. Both free and premium ones are available, all built on this advanced framework.
Add-ons: 3dcart includes more built-in features than most platforms, but a large catalog of add-ons are also available to customize your store as needed. You can integrate 3dcart with hundreds of third-party software solutions for all your business needs. Add-ons are also available that bring additional B2B tools to your website, but you can also get these included free in the right plan.
SEO: Besides the optimizations in the templates, 3dcart has powerful SEO throughout the software. There is a full collection of tools for customizing URLs and meta tags, rich snippets, robots.txt, canonical URLs, 301 redirects, and much more. Automation is also included for XML sitemap generation and even automatic redirects when needed. Few platforms give as much control over SEO.
Customer support: 3dcart has a support team available 24/7 all year, including holidays. They can be reached through live chat, phone call, or the ticket system. All 3dcart support is based in their home office in the US.
Sales Features: 3dcart covers all types of sales features, including email marketing newsletters, stackable coupons and discounts, abandoned cart recovery, multichannel sales, and more. There is even a Sales Rep module for assigning different employees to specific clients. B2B stores will appreciate being able to offer multiple bulk pricing levels, and the Customer Groups feature allows you to give a different shopping experience and pricing levels to different types of customer.
Pricing: 3dcart has several pricing plans suitable for businesses in different stages of growth. But they are also the only eCommerce provider to have a dedicated B2B plan. The main plans are as follows:
- Startup: $19/month
- Basic: $29/month
- Plus: $79/month
- Power: $129/month
- Pro: $229/month
- B2B: $379/month
All plans have a 10% discount if you pay annually. The B2B plan is of the most interest here, as it has several high-value features included free, like the Quick Order Pad that lets repeat customers fill out an order form with part numbers or product SKUs rather than needing to browse your site.
On top of that, 3dcart B2B has everything from 3dcart Pro, amounting to hundreds of features. The extras in the B2B plan are normally available as add-ons with a separate cost.
Of course, you can still use other 3dcart plans as you grow your business. They all allow for unlimited products, and include SSL and PCI compliance, SEO, and more. Tiered bulk pricing is available on all plans but you’ll need at least 3dcart Plus for the Customer Groups feature.
If you outgrow the B2B plan you can also move to 3dcart Enterprise plans which start at $499.99/month.
Why Do Users Love 3dcart?
- 3dcart is easy to use, with dashboards that are intuitive while still providing plenty of tools.
- 3dcart has excellent analytics, based on its own data and also integration with Google.
- It’s an established platform that updates on a regular basis to add new features and enhance existing ones.
- 3dcart websites achieve high performance on page speed, SEO ranking, and other crucial metrics across all devices.
B2B Ecommerce Platform #4- Jimdo
Jimdo is the 6th most popular on the Entire Internet and the most popular in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Japan, Netherland, and many more countries in the Hosted Solution category.
Top Features
Templates: At Jimdo, you can get more than a hundred modern template variations to choose from for your online store. It enables you to add photos, text, blog posts, galleries, videos, social media links, maps, contact forms, and much more other content to your site.
Add-ons: Jimdo provides an ‘add element’ icon in its editor, check out all the features you want to embed in your website. If you don’t find something specifically of your choice, you can search for it through ‘POWr Plug-ins’, an independent company partnered with Jimdo.
SEO: Jimdo’s sites are automatic search engine optimized. Further, it helps its users rank their site high on Google and other search engines by offering them SEO guides, SEO FAQs, articles, and everything needed for new creators.
Customer support: Jimdo provides online help to its users via email. You can explain your issues or queries through email, and the Support Team member will contact you to resolve your problem.
Sales Features: Profit more with Jimdo, as it doesn’t charge any commissions or fees on your sales. You can enjoy easy shipping, order management, and automatic confirmation emails. You can also get a range of payment options, such as PayPal or bank transfers.
Pricing: Jimdo has three pricing plans to offer.
Basic (For your personal or creative project) – $15/month
Business (For professional online shop) – $19/month
VIP (complete toolbox for success) – $39/month
Some of the features are common in all plans, such as online store, 0% commission, free domain, HTTP security, storage, and support response time.
Why Do Users Love Jimdo?
- Jimdo provides template designs for every industry, has automatic SEO, provides professional domains, and offers easy-to-track statistics.
- Users can get maximum sale benefits with its zero transaction fees.
- Convenient payment methods and flexible product variants are additional advantages.
B2B Ecommerce Platform #5- Shopify
Shopify is trusted by 1,000,000 businesses across the world.
Undoubtedly, it is one of the most popular e-commerce solutions in the world, yet its popularity is still rising.
John Jacobs, Kylie, Nush, Raymond, Star Struck are few of the renowned names powered by Shopify.
Top Features
Templates: More than 70 free and premium professionally designed e-commerce website templates, each in different styles are available in the Shopify theme store.
Add-ons: The add-ons app of Shopify makes the process of multiple products purchase easy and frictionless. While free e-commerce plug-ins are available, the standard add-ons price starts from $7.50/month.
SEO: You can get SEO built-in and added features in Shopify online stores to reach optimized content. Few SEO parts are taken care of automatically like pages are added with auto-generated canonical tags to get rid of duplicate content that may appear in search results.
Customer Support: Help Center is open 24x7x365 for assistance and can be contacted through email, chat, or phone.
Sales Features: Shopify offers a built-in mobile commerce shopping cart to help your customers browse and buy from your store through any mobile phone or tablet. Further, you get the advantage of 100 payment gateways, automatic tax calculation, automatic email to customers with abandoned checkout records, and automatic carrier shipping rates.
Pricing: Shopify has three pricing plans to offer:
- Basic Plan (for new business) – USD 29/month
- Shopify (for growing business) – USD 79/month
- Advanced Shopify (for established business) – USD 299
Advanced Shopify charges the least transaction fees, i.e., 0.5%, compared to Shopify, which asks for 1.0% and Basic with 2.0%.
Also, the advance report builder and the third-party calculated shipping rate is an additional benefit in the Advanced Shopify plan.
Why Do Users Love Shopify?
- Shopify gives its users the benefit of easy setup and use. Also, it doesn’t require any skill related to technicalities for development and hosting the online store.
- You can create visually appealing online stores integrated with security and reliability features.
- All the themes in Shopify’s are made mobile responsive, plus it includes a free built-in mobile commerce shopping cart, giving freedom to the user to perform shopping anytime and through any device.
B2B Ecommerce Platform #6- WooCommerce
As per the reports of BuiltWith, until January 2020, 3,876,748 websites are using WooCommerce or 0.2% of all websites. It might not be huge but can be called a sizable proportion.
Top Features
Templates: WooCommerce offers themes at a reasonable price, and few of them are also offered for free. Themes available can be used to set up online stores related to different industries. Some of the top themes include arts & crafts, bookings & accommodations, digital & audio, electronics and software, fashion & apparel, food and drinks, flowers and gifts, pets, health, beauty, home, furniture, sports, toys, and games.
Add-ons: WooCommerce’s extension store is rich in varieties of extensions to manage a store, marketing, payments, shipping, etc. All the extensions are not paid, many of them are free.
SEO: Most of the templates by the Woocommerce support SEO rules, as it runs on WordPress. You can further add power to its SEO features by using SEO plug-ins like Yoast SEO or All in one SEO pack offered by WooCommerce.
Customer support: Most of the frequently asked questions have been addressed in the form of articles or learning guides. For queries not answered in their documentation or FAQs, you can fill up a form, and the support team will get back to you. If you are already a customer, you can open a support request, and your issues will be resolved.
Sales features: WooCommerce features flexible and secure payment options. Apart from the basics, there are 140 region-specific gateways to choose from, which include Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Moreover, there are automated tax calculations, live shipping rates from leading carriers, options to print labels at home, and the mobile app for iOS and Android.
Pricing: WooCommerce is a free open-source plug-in built on WordPress, but you will have to pay for a domain name and a hosting service. There can be additional costs like a theme, plug-ins, and extensions, and developer fees.
Why Do Users Love WooCommerce?
- Firstly, it is free, makes a professional-looking e-commerce site, is secure, and has lots of flexibility.
- There are a lot of customization options along with free and premium themes.
- With WooCommerce, as it runs on WordPress, optimizing e-commerce sites for SEO becomes easy compared to other e-commerce platforms in the market.
B2B Ecommerce Platform #7- Wix
Wix is one of the highly preferred website builders, world-wide. It currently powers 451,169 live websites.
Top features
Templates: With more than 500 e-commerce templates, Wix offers plenty of choices for your storefront. Also, you get access to galleries, collections, related products, and a customer wishlist to customize your storefront. The user-friendly drag-and-drop editor is an additional benefit offered by Wix, which allows you to add content, cool videos, and functionality as per your requirements.
Add-ons: Wix is one of the most versatile website builders with an impressive 250 add-ons. With just a few clicks, you can have any add-ons to your site. Get subscribers, social media streams, 123 form builder, and site search are to name a few popular Wix add-ons used to create a flexible and well-supported site with ease.
SEO: Wix SEO Wiz has every tool one needs to improve Google ranking. The personalized Wix site builder powered by artificial intelligence asks a few simple questions to the user. Thereafter, it brings out a personalized plan to boost your Google ranking using simple steps. Further, you don’t need to know coding skills for using this Wix SEO.
Customer Support: Wix help center can help you with thousands of well-written articles in 9 different languages, covering almost all platforms. Wix editor comprises videos for nearly every feature and element, each of them describing the features step-by-by. Plus, there is email support and a call center for further assistance. Besides, Wix Code Forum is there to address questions about coding.
Sales features: Shipping becomes easy with Wix, as you can track your orders from your dashboard. Also, you can set different shipping and tax rules for your products, depending on the delivery area. Some of the other attractive features include abandoned cart recovery, Wix Ascend, inventory management, and five different payment options.
Pricing: Several pricing plans are available on a monthly or yearly basis on Wix. Yearly cost provides a discount per month and other benefits. Premium plan costs INR 29/month, which includes a 1-year domain registry, free hosting, 500MB+ storage, and much more. Free plans are also available, but that doesn’t include a customized domain.
Why Do Users Love Wix?
- Wix is extremely user-friendly to create and manage an e-commerce website. The easy drag-and-drop feature is what it is actually known for.
- It offers the ease of managing inventory, tracking orders, and communicating with the customers.
- Different types of e-commerce plans are available from basic to premium with several benefits.
B2B Ecommerce Platform #8- Weebly
Weebly is considered to be an apt choice to build a fully-functional online store.
Around 1,609,125 websites are powered by Weebly and it is ranked 5th most popular in the Top 1 Million sites in the Hosted Solution category.
Top Features
Templates: Weebly offers responsive themes for your online store with amazing features to tweak your Storefront Page as per your brand or business. You can display products of your choice on the page to showcase your best sellers, seasonal products, or promotional items.
Add-ons
At Weebly, you can find App Center with myriads of app options under the categories of e-commerce, communication, marketing, social, and site tools & features to power your site. Some of the top-notch apps are built by Weebly.
SEO
All the websites created by Weebly are designed automatically with search engine optimization strategies. It means, every site boasts a sitemap, SEO-friendly HTML formatting, meta descriptions, responsive design, and a lot more. It also includes extensive advanced search engine optimization settings like alt tags on images and page-specific descriptions. For beginners, an SEO guide is provided for reference.
Customer support
Weebly is highly helpful to its users in terms of providing support through a guide, answering common questions. If the issue is not resolved with the guide and links, you can call their customer care number during standard business hours or email them anytime, and they will get back to you.
Sales Features
Weebly gives an option to fine-tune your shipping rates on the basis of price, weight, and geographical locations. You can also mention shipping carriers (e.g. UPS, USPS, FedEx, etc.) and delivery time slots (ground, 3-day, or overnight). Free shipping on select orders can also be ordered by the user. Tax is an important part, which is taken care of by Weebly by providing and maintaining the current city, state, and province grade tax rates for the US and Canada. You can also import products externally, like Etsy, Shopify, or CSV File.
Pricing
Weebly has three pricing plans to offer.
- Pro (For groups and organizations) – $12/month (when paid annually)
- Business (For small business and stores) – $25/month (when paid annually)
- Business Plus (For power seller) – $38/month (when paid annually)
Many of the features are common in all the plans, such as free SSL security, unlimited storage, connecting a custom domain, removing Weebly ads, shopping cart, accept payment through 3rd party provides SEO, advanced site stats, and more.
Why Do Users Love Weebly?
- Weebly powers you to create customizable templates that are simple, stylish, and mobile responsive.
- The web hosting service offered is extremely fast and efficient.
- Weebly also offers a helpful SEO guide which is very useful to get advice on coding, keyword optimization, and tips to boost the ranking of your site.
B2B Ecommerce Platform #9- BigCommerce
With the incredible ability to launch professional online stores within hours, it has listed itself in the top-rated e-commerce platform.
BigCommerce is powering some of the leading brands like Jeep People, Tyler’s, Di Bruno Bros, Berlin Packaging, etc.
Top Features
Templates: BigCommerce has a rich collection of themes to meet the requirements of a number of industries. Some of them are animals, automotive, books, electronics, fashion, food, gifts, health, sports, toys, etc. Both free and paid templates are available with unique features.
Add-ons: You can expand your site’s capability with free apps, BigCommerce recommends, paid apps, newest apps, and more apps collection. You can also make a selection of add-ons under the category of accounts, analytics & reporting, B2B/Whole, sales and channel, shipping and fulfillment, and a lot more.
SEO: There are many areas in the BigCommerce control panel that facilitate its user to make the page, even more, SEO friendly. It allows you to fill content pages, category pages, product pages, blog posts, and brands with page titles, descriptions, and keywords to increase traffic and conversion.
Customer support: BigCommerce provides detailed solutions to many common issues in the form of thousands of articles and learning guidelines. Apart from that, it has live chats, phone support, and email support, where you can reach them 24/7.
Sales Features: BigCommerce promises 99.99% average uptime for e-commerce hosting, helping you focus on selling. BigCommerce has an incredible record of store migration with a dedicated in-house catalog transfer team. The team is an expert in moving stores, whether you have a small business or established enterprise.
Pricing: BigCommerce brings four plans:
- Standard (Basic plan to run an online store) – $29.95/month
- Plus (To grow business with marketing tools) – $79.95/month
- Pro (To grow business with a comprehensive set of features) – $249.95 per month
- Enterprise (To grow business with the best full-service platform) – Custom Pricing
The transaction fee is nil in all the plans. Plus you get product file, file storage, bandwidth, and staff accounts unlimited in all the plans.
If you opt for yearly plans for plus or pro, you can save up to 10%.
Except for enterprise, the rest of the plans fit small scale to medium scale business.
You can check which one suits your business by taking 15 days of trial free.
Why Do Users Love BigCommerce?
- The most loved feature of Bigcommerce is the ease of use. You don’t need to be a pro to set up your online store.
- It is secured and PCI compliant, which is a high concern for B2B ecommerce businesses.
- Bigcommerce is experienced in migrating e-commerce sites. You don’t need to worry before shifting your site from any other platform to BigCommerce.
- Additionally, it provides a built-in conversion feature, tools to streamline operations, and secured multiple payment gateways.
B2B Ecommerce Platform #10- Magento
Magento is powering 772,576 websites, as of February 2020. The incredible customization features are one of the biggest reasons for its popularity.
From small businesses to mid-sized businesses and enterprise-level companies, Magento is assisting everyone.
Brands that are currently using Magento as their preferred B2B ecommerce platform are Bauhaus, intelligentsia, Bevmo, HP, NCare, Sigma, etc.
Top features
Templates: At Magento’s market place you can get a number of appealing templates at competitive prices. For more options, you can visit ThemeForest or Template Monster, which presents hundreds of attractive Magento templates to download at different prices.
Add-ons: At Magento, you can get more than 5800 extensions under different categories to increase the functionalities of your online store. Whether you want to extend the functionality of your online store’s accounts, content, marketing, payment & security, reporting & analysis, sales, shipping, or site optimization, Magento has it all.
SEO: Magento has superb in-built SEO features, hence the themes offered are SEO-friendly. You can further extend Magento’s SEO abilities by enabling Magento’s SEO-friendly URLs or by installing SEO plug-ins for your online store.
Customer support: Magento’s customer support is vast. Magento provides various ways to help its customers instantly by providing various articles and learning guides for troubleshooting, FAQs, How to, and Help Center Guide. Besides, it offers a 24-hour call center with dedicated contact numbers for different countries.
Sales features: Magento makes it easy for its users to manage their accounts with features like easy to understand account dashboard. You can view recent orders, history, and status, store unlimited address, save wish list with comments, and manage newsletter subscription. Users can enjoy various options of tracking, analyzing, and reporting, like Google Analytics, sales, and tax reports. You can also manage abandoned shopping cart and low stock report, total sales and refunded invoice, product review report, and more.
Pricing: Magento has e-commerce solutions for every business, be it small, medium, or large enterprise. Magento offers three platform versions:
- Magento Open Source
- Magento Commerce
- Magento Commerce Cloud.
Out of these, Magento Open Source is a free edition, which can be downloaded and is available free of cost. The rest of the versions’ cost varies with features. To know the actual pricing, you need to call the sales team on a dedicated contact number provided on their site.
Why do users love Magento?
- Magento’s customer support system is amazingly strong.
- Magento has the capability to host multiple websites with just 1 back-end admin, one of the key features it is known for.
- Users can select any hosting company of their choice. They are not bound to the hosting offered by the platform itself.
- The latest design trends, SEO ranking factors, online store needs, and security features are all taken care of as per the needs of the e-commerce industry.
Best B2B Ecommerce Platforms Comparison Table
To make a perfect choice, it is essential that you remain clear about your requirements and expectations.
Here is an easy comparison table of the top B2B ecommerce website builders that you can consider for your business:
E-Commerce Platform | Ease of Use | Functionality Offered | Support | Value for Money | Overall Rating |
OpenCart | Good | Good | Excellent | Good | 4.7 |
Squarespace Commerce | Average | Excellent | Good | Above Average | 4.6 |
Jimdo | Good | Above Average | Excellent | Good | 4.6 |
Shopify | Excellent | Good | Good | Average | 4.6 |
WooCommerce | Good | Good | Excellent | Average | 4.6 |
Wix | Excellent | Good | Good | Above Average | 4.6 |
Weebly | Average | Limited | Excellent | Good | 4.5 |
BigCommerce | Average | Excellent | Excellent | Average | 4.5 |
Magento | Average | Good | Excellent | Average | 4.4 |
Hopefully, this table has given a clear picture of the worth of different B2B website builders on several significant parameters.
You can now make a better choice for your business and get started with B2B selling.
Conclusion
All the above B2B website builders have great features.
Some are rich in designs, whereas others provide great ease-of-use.
You should choose the B2B platform that offers the best features and pricing depend on your exact business needs.