From last year 2020, eCommerce sales have been fueling the digital competition. After the pandemic broke out and people were restricted to their homes, consumers started purchasing more online.
According to researchers, by the end of 2040, around 95% of purchasing will be done online. Since the number of eCommerce consumers are increasing rapidly, so does the number of opportunities.
Moreover, B2B marketers are accepting this new emerging trend rapidly and shifting their brick-and-mortar business on digital platforms so they can generate more leads and improve sales conversion rate.
China and the United States – these are two superpower nations who are ruling the B2B eCommerce industry currently. Amazon and Alibaba – the two eCommerce giants have already stepped into the B2B eCommerce industry.
When these top brands have already stepped their foot in the B2B market, it’s necessary that you should at least start thinking about shifting your business to the digital market.
To stay relevant and flourish in this highly competitive industry, it’s essential to establish your business on a digital platform.
For your information, there are plenty of options available out there in the market. Before choosing one, you first need to analyze your overall business needs.
Out of those plenty options, WooCommerce and Shopify are two most reputable and popular eCommerce platforms.
Now comes the multimillion dollar question: which eCommerce platform is superior? Which is better, Shopify or WooCommerce?
Both eCommerce platforms are excellent for launching a B2C enterprise. Our key concern, though, is which eCommerce platform is appropriate and suitable for a B2B eCommerce store.
If you’re confused between the two options, don’t you worry a bit.
In this post, we’ll be discussing both the eCommerce platform from a B2B eCommerce perspective.
Before we get into the further details, let’s first discuss the key features and price plans of both the eCommerce platforms.
So without further ado, let’s begin.
Shopify vs WooCommerce : The overview
Shopify
Shopify is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that is now widely used to build a full-scale eCommerce shop. Strikingly, Shopify has a wide range of specialised tools that help you easily streamline all of the store operations seamlessly.
Shopify, as opposed to WooCommerce, manages the eCommerce business more effectively. Since it is a closed-source eCommerce platform, it not only assists retailers in building an eCommerce store, but it also manages the technological aspects of your web store on its own.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is basically a plugin of WordPress. If you don’t know what WordPress is, let us tell you in brief. WordPress is one of the most secure, powerful and popular open-source CMS platforms.
If you visit the official plugin directory of WordPress, you’ll find countless plugins. However, WooCommerce is not just a regular plugin. It’s an eCommerce plugin that allows you to convert your simple blogging website into a fully functional eCommerce website.
Since WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, it’s a highly flexible and customizable eCommerce platform.
WooCommerce is an excellent eCommerce platform that provides all of the necessary resources to users to create an eye-catching eCommerce shop.
However, in order to use WooCommerce, you should have a basic understanding of how to handle technological issues, since you would be responsible for the technical aspects if you want to launch your eCommerce store on WooCommerce.
From choosing web hosting server, user-roles management, customization, and site security to have to look after everything yourself.
ShopifyPlus or B2BWoo: Which is a better choice for your B2B store?
ShopifyPlus
ShopifyPlus is a popular flagship product of Shopify. It provides advanced and numerous B2B-specific solutions to its users. It offers quite a handful of outstanding features that will assist B2B marketers in building and designing a mighty B2B eCommerce shop.
Aside from providing B2B-specific features, it offers numerous value-laden outstanding features such as:
Search engine visibility : To rank higher on search engines calls for a lot of effort and time, but some B2B merchants don’t want their B2B store to show up in search results for various reasons. With ShopifyPlus, you can hide your complete eCommerce website or some part of it from showing up in search results. Plus you can easily do it all without tweaking a single line of code.
Password protected shop : Customarily, wholesalers often avoid showcasing their products prices openly. If you’re one of them, you can use this optimal feature. ShopifyPlus allows you to hide and protect your eCommerce products until and unless your consumers sign-up or sign-in into their user account.
Purchasing terms : As we just mentioned, until and unless consumers don’t log in to their user account they cannot view your products and purchase them. Depending on your consumers, you can use this purchasing terms feature to set specific prices.
Let’s take a look at some of ShopifyPlus other features:
- Outstanding inventory management
- Catalog management
- Built-in marketing
- No hidden charges
- Easily integrates with existing systems
B2BWoo
If we travel back the clock, launching a fully functioning B2B eCommerce store was a pretty challenging and time-consuming task as there wasn’t a single B2B dedicated eCommerce platform. Users need to hire an agency to develop a custom B2B store as there was no off-the-rack option available.
Fortunately, WooCommerce took notice of this issue and to help B2B sellers, their professional team developed a fully-dedicated B2B eCommerce platform now known as B2BWoo. Previously you were using plenty of B2B plugins to support your store, but now things have drastically changed with the launch of B2BWoo.
B2BWoo is certainly an all-in-one B2B solution provided by WooCommerce that is identical to Shopify Plus.B2BWoo has a plethora of advanced and amazing features to improve and enhance the wholesale experience.
Let’s check out some startling features of B2BWoo:
Show or hide products : Like ShopifyPlus, B2BWoo also allows its users to show or hide products depending on your customer’s login status.
Quick order : We believe this is one of the most stellar B2B features that lets you improve your order processing operations by allowing buyers to easily order products via a quick order table instead of ordering each item separately.
Corporate account management : B2B shoppers are not the same as B2C consumers in that instead of a sole buyer, they are basically groups of consumers, normally sales managers, who shop for their company.
B2BWoo has a roles and authorization control function that helps companies to build a purchaser hierarchy on their eCommerce store to enhance their experience.
Some other notable B2BWoo features are:
- Dynamic pricing
- Request for quote
- Volume-based discounts
- Bulk reorders
- Tailored catalogs
- Cart sharing
Which B2B eCommerce platform is best suited for your B2B business? Shopify or WooCommerce?
After debating on both eCommerce platforms, it’s time to make our final decision: which platform is more suitable for a B2B eCommerce business?
According to facts and figures, WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce site as opposed to Shopify for a variety of factors. Many business websites, on the other hand, favour Shopify.
So what about B2B? Which platform is more suitable for a B2B eCommerce store?
Both eCommerce platforms are very similar in terms of ecommerce features, performance, and functionality. The main goal of all eCommerce technologies is to enhance the customer experience. Both eCommerce platforms are easy to integrate with other existing systems and both are also highly scalable.
Using any of the two eCommerce platform will assist you in painlessly digitising your brick-and-mortar business.
You already have the ball in your hands. It is determined by the company’s needs and criteria, as well as your personal interests.
What we would recommend is that if you are fantastic at managing technical aspects and are familiar with WordPress, you can go for WooCommerce; otherwise, ShopifyPlus is a better alternative for you.
