Selling online to business customers is genuinely different from selling to consumers. This piece is about B2B portals and pricing in Odoo eCommerce.
B2B selling is different
An online store can sell to consumers, individual people, or to businesses, B2B, business-to-business. B2B selling is genuinely different. A business customer is often a known, ongoing customer with a relationship, not an anonymous one-off buyer. A business customer often has its own agreed pricing, different from a general consumer price. And a business customer buying online is doing so as part of an ongoing commercial relationship. So an Odoo eCommerce store selling B2B has to handle business customers in a way that fits that genuinely different situation.
B2B pricing
A central part of B2B is pricing. Business customers commonly do not pay a general published price; they have their own agreed pricing, often specific to that customer or that kind of customer, reflecting their commercial relationship. So a B2B eCommerce store has to handle customer-specific pricing: a business customer, when they buy online, seeing and paying their genuine agreed price, not a general consumer price. Odoo handles this through its pricing capabilities, pricelists, which can apply the right pricing to the right customers, so a B2B customer's online buying is at their genuine agreed price.
The B2B portal
The other part of B2B is the portal. A business customer in an ongoing relationship benefits from more than an anonymous storefront; it benefits from a portal, a way of accessing the store and the relationship as the known customer it is. Through a portal, a business customer can engage with the store as itself, with its agreed pricing, and see the things relevant to its ongoing relationship, such as its orders. The B2B portal makes the online buying part of the genuine ongoing relationship, rather than treating the business customer as an anonymous one-off buyer.
Why handling B2B distinctly matters
Handling B2B distinctly matters because treating a business customer as if it were an anonymous consumer fits the situation poorly. A business customer with agreed pricing, treated to a general consumer price, is not getting its genuine deal. A business customer in an ongoing relationship, treated as an anonymous buyer, is not being served as the known customer it is. An Odoo eCommerce store that sells B2B should handle its business customers distinctly, with their genuine pricing and a portal appropriate to an ongoing customer, so the online channel genuinely fits B2B selling.
The takeaway
B2B portals and pricing in Odoo eCommerce handle the genuinely different situation of selling online to business customers. B2B pricing handles that business customers commonly have their own agreed pricing, so they see and pay their genuine price online, handled through Odoo's pricing capabilities. The B2B portal lets a business customer engage with the store as the known customer it is, part of its ongoing relationship. Handling B2B distinctly matters, because treating a business customer as an anonymous consumer fits the situation poorly. For how we approach Odoo, see our ERP practice.