Why we think Magento is the preferred B2B e-commerce platform?
Here’s a scene you’ll see in our offices every day. Around 9am our team of developers grab a cup of coffee and gather around for a short ‘stand up’. We never do our meetings sitting down. We like to keep things short and to the point. If it does not lead to concrete actions we´d rather skip it.
One after the other tells simply what they have been doing yesterday and what they will be doing today. Are there any specific challenges? We’ll tackle them together.
Daily, we’re mainly focussed on three things:
- what would make our customers happy?
- what doesn’t work in our module and should be fixed?
- what works “ok” in our module and should be improved?
These three questions keep us sharp and help us to work towards our unchanged goal; to be the best Magento Request For Quote (RFQ) Module on the planet.
We love Magento and would recommend it highly to any B2B company that wants to go and sell online. But we also know what’s needed to make Magento truly B2B proof!
We’ve been working hard on some new functionalities and improvements in our release of Cart2Quote 5.1.0 - stable. Click here to see the concise release notes. In this blogpost we’ll go through some of the main new and updated Quotation Functionalities for Magento.
Want to get started? Try Cart2Quote for free!
Requirements
To be able to benefit from this latest Cart2Quote version we require Magento CE 1.7+, Magento EE 1.12+ and PHP 5.3+
Big on CRM
Cart2Quote was born to make Magento perform better in Customer Relationship Management. Our module helps you as a B2B webshop owner to converse with your customers about products and prices, so that it may lead to converted price proposals.
Converse better, convert better.
So, we added some awesome new features to the Cart2Quote CRM. You’ll love them:
- Quote Status History. From the first quote request to the final invoice, you can now track and check the complete history of communication between you (or your sales reps) and your customers. The information this will give you is invaluable! Learn from the questions your clients ask and change your way of working accordingly. Why do some sales reps sell more than others? How can you help them to improve their contact with your customers?
- Two Way Communication. Customers can now comment on a quote in the frontend (their customer dashboard) and your sales reps can respond in the backend. Easy, fast and all visible in the quote status history as conversation threading. No need to pick up the phone or send separate emails, all is handled now from your own Magento backend.
- Multiple Files Upload. Sometimes you want to send some extra files, pictures or PDF’s to your customers. We made it possible for you to do that from within your C2Q backend. Send your best quotes with several pictures to ensure your client that this is indeed what he needs.
- Hide Quote From Sales Reps. Sometimes you want your sales reps just to mind their own business. Literally. So we made it possible for you (or the super-admin) to assign specific roles to specific sales reps. If you don’t want Chris to read John’s quotes and proposals, you can manage that. Now this is also great if you have third parties work on your site. They don’t need to know all the details on your customers, prices and quotes, so just hide it from them. Easy and safe!
Is Your Magento B2B eCommerce Website Making Money?
At the end of the day you’re in (online) business to make money. A key thing then is to know the margin between cost price and sales price. Here’s some options we have improved for you:
- Overwrite Cost Price Per Quote. Let’s work with an example. Say, you sell printed umbrella’s and your supplier normally charges you $2 per piece. That $2 is standard in your product’s cost price section. So if you sell 1.000 umbrella’s for $4 per piece Magento automatically shows you made a profit of $2.000. Well done. Now, we have made it possible for you to edit the cost price PER QUOTE.
Say, now you have an enquiry for 10.000 umbrella’s. You ask your supplier for a cheaper price for this special, large enquiry. He’s willing to drop his price to $1.50 for this quantity. You can now, in your Cart2Quote backend, edit the cost price so you can still track what profit it would give you if you would sell these products.
- Enter Tier Cost Prices. Let’s stick to this example. Ask your supplier for tier prices so you don’t have to ask him every time you want a special deal. Simply enter these tier prices in your backend and keep track of your profit, whether you sell 1 or 10.000 umbrella’s!
Making Magento Work Better For B2B Companies
We reckon CRM and Money are high on any B2B company’s agenda. But there’s more to Cart2Quote that makes B2B work better online:
- New Manuals. We learn continually and change our website and manuals on a daily basis. Though we would recommend only Magento specialists to really dive deep into the backend code, we still want to serve our customers with clear guides. So we have put some new manuals online for you to use.
- German Translations. Aber natürlich! Our B2B extension is used worldwide and is now available in numerous languages. We love our German customers and want to serve them better with a proper “de_de language file”! Email Designs. We have made sure that all your quote-email design templates are now loaded from the frontend design.
- And More. We have listed a whole lot of fixes and improvements in our release notes overview. Thank you for pointing things out and helping us to keep on improving.
Helping You To Make B2B eCommerce Great
We’re always looking to serve our customers better. And we know that we don’t offer a ‘one size fits all’ solution. We do sell different versions that indeed fit different sizes and types of B2B companies. But often it requires customization to meet specific needs. We do this too. In fact, we’re great at tackling difficult projects and diving into tricky material. Need help with making your Magento e-commerce website communicate better with your customers? We’re glad to help. Please fill out the form below and we’ll get back to you!
