Whether you’re planning on upgrading to Magento 2.4 immediately or in a few months as a B2B merchant (or merchant with B2B plans) you will be excited about the new features that will allow your business customers to conduct self-service purchasing activity. We’re particularly excited about the new purchase order approval module, which will be integrated with company roles and permissions. This will allow b2b merchants to provide N number of people from a company customer to self-service purchase and will integrate the purchase order approval process right in the admin screens of the Magento storefront.
Here at Accorin, we’ve developed a few other extensions that we believe will make the Magento 2.4 upgrade even better for B2B implementations. We demo’d these extensions at this year’s Virtual Magento Imagine conference and you can see those in-depth demo’s on our YouTube channel. 
Here’s a quick summary of each:

Company Address Book

Since we are talking about complex buyers that order using different people within a company that work from different locations, we found it’s important to provide flexibility around the Magento 2 address book functionality. We have extended the “Address Book” functionality to cope with some key requirements that we found our clients consistently needed, while also making it more intuitive for complex B2B organizations to manage.
We have worked with a number of clients who needed to allow a company structure to interact with a company address book and who needed to share the address book across the organization. We have extended the address book to do just that. The Company Address Book extension can be used to ensure that a subordinate or any company user can only send orders to specific location(s). However it can also be used to allow a procurement manager the ability to send an order to ANY allowed location of the business.

Shared Requisition Lists

While the requisition list functionality that is part of Magento 2 core as of 2.2 is handy, it lacks some aspects that make it most useful for buyers that are a part of complex organizations.

  • The ability for buyers at one location within a company to use requisition lists that were created by another similar location within the company
  • The ability for managers to share their requisition lists with newly-authorised buyers
  • A way for senior managers to create a variety of requisition lists so individual retail outlet managers within the company could purchase the same list of inventory during critical periods of inventory management
  • Tighter control between inventory supply and demand within a complex organization and a tool that could help manage buying activity

So, we modified the functionality so that it is completely integrated with Roles and Permissions and company hierarchy of permissions. This way users can delegate requisition lists to subordinate users giving them access to requisition lists that control what they can order. These specific purchasing lists ensure control and reduce shrinkage – especially in retail settings.

Previously Purchased Products

Magento 2 has great flexibility for users to manage and also track orders and to provide quick order and reorder functionalities which are essential to complex B2B organizations. Traditionally magento has a very order-centric view. However, and somewhat surprisingly, out of the box Magento 2 does NOT provide a view of previously purchased PRODUCTS without digging into order details. We’ve seen merchant clients and their teams have a very product-centric view.
The Previously Purchased Products extension solves for use cases where customers are looking to find items that were previously ordered at the PRODUCT level (Vs. the order level).

The Bottom Line

2.4 is a big Magento upgrade, especially for B2B. There are plenty of new features as well as performance and security upgrades. Accorin clients get unlimited access to ALL of our extensions just for being our clients and these additional extensions are a bonus that merchants upgrading to 2.4 are sure to love.
Contact us for more information, or to schedule a demo of our Magento 2 extensions.

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