Does OroCommerce Challenge B2BCloud For New And Growing Businesses?

The team founded OroCRM in 2102 and quickly established an open-source community around it. They say they are now committed to delivering a B2B-centric commerce application that will ‘disrupt the space’ by building a business to business (B2B) application from the ground up. OroCommerce is also open-source and the developers say that it is designed with flexibility in mind, to be customised and extended to fit any B2B commerce needs.

We decided to take a closer look to see whether this new kid on the block is a challenger for the B2BCloud crown as the ideal solution for new and growing B2B ecommerce businesses.

Customer experience

With B2B customers increasingly behaving more like B2C customers, using the whole range of online resources to research, compare and ultimately make their buying decisions, optimising B2B ecommerce sites to be responsive and mobile friendly is increasingly important.

OroCommerce claims to deliver tools to support best customer experience practices. Capabilities include personalisation, localisation, intelligent marketing tools, powerful reports and a segmentation engine. However, to make the best use of these tools you will need considerable expert knowledge.

There are differences between B2B ecommerce and retail experiences. Even though they appear similar on the surface, they serve different customer and purchasing profiles. B2BCloud has been designed to deliver an optimised B2B ecommerce customer journey from design and user experience through to back-office management. B2BCloud is under continuous development, delivering automatic updates to keep users ahead of the competition.

Driving innovation

As an open-source product, OroCommerce is built on widely used technologies including PHP, Symfony 2, and the OroPlatform itself. These technologies undoubtedly attract a large and talented pool of developers that constantly releases tested solutions and drives innovation. However, to take advantage of these innovations, customers will need to know how to integrate them.

B2BCloud also has a team of developers continually working on new ideas and innovations. The bonus for new and small businesses is that, because B2BCloud is on a single cloud-based ecommerce platform, there’s no need for the services of a web agency to setup servers. Changes, fixes and new functionality are automatically deployed to all customers at once. Support, maintenance and ongoing management of the B2BCloud ecommerce platform are all included in the monthly payment plan, so costs are more easily managed too.

Advanced features

OroCommerce includes features such as advanced search capabilities, a built in CMS system with support for multiple price lists, quote-to-order process, Quick Order forms, support for multi-business and corporate customer accounts. This all helps to reduce the need to extensively customise existing ecommerce applications.

B2BCloud also includes a wide range of features as standard, including Quick Order, category page ordering and customer specific pricing as well as integration with all the major back office systems.