Creating a Magento Multistore to Help the Client’s Business Reach B2B and B2C Segments

Challenges

To boost sales, the company management decided to create an ecommerce website targeting B2B and B2C customer groups from different countries. The store is pretty standard in terms of front-end functionality, but there are a few back-end features that required custom Magento development.

Development

GaitLine is set up as a multistore Magento site: one Magento installation manages 7 websites targeting customers in different countries. Each site has its own default currency — NOK, AED, DKK, EURO, GBP, SEK, and USD. This kind of website structure allows the admin to set up different pricing for products and bill the customer’s credit card with the local currency instead of the default store currency — respectively, no currency conversion is involved.

To avoid customer confusion and save the shopper one action (switching between the sites depending on the selected currency), we have installed an IP detector extension that identifies the shopper’s location and automatically redirects him to the respective site. For example, if a customer from Norway wants to buy shoes and lands on the GaitLine site, he sees the NOK website, and when he makes a purchase, the order amount is charged in Norwegian krones.

Featuress

Integration with Prime Cargo

In order to minimize manual order handling, our client requested integration with Prime Cargo. We developed an extension according to the Prime Cargo documentation which seamlessly integrates Magento with Cargo and doesn’t require any manual order management.

One of the features of our extension allows changing the shipping price depending on the shipping country: Europe – free, North America – $19.90, and the rest of the world – $29.90.

Taxes, checkout, and payment methods

Our client had special requirements for taxes, payments, and checkouts depending on the user’s group B2B or B2C and the user’s country. In order to meet the client’s requirements, the following features were implemented:

Taxes

We developed a tax extension that allows configuring unique tax display settings for each user group and for the countries within each group. For example, if B2C users is making a purchase in Belgium, they land on the Euro website where the prices are shown including the taxes. At the same time, prices for B2B customers in Belgium can be displayed without taxes.

This setting shows the price in-store including or excluding 25% VAT depending on which customer group you belong to — B2B or B2C.

Checkouts

For users from the B2C group we show different checkouts depending on the shipment countries: for Norway, Denmark, Sweden — it’s Klarna checkout, for the rest of the world it’s Firecheckout.

When it comes to customers from the B2B group, they can pay only via Firecheckout.

Payment methods

In order to show different payment methods for different customer groups, we installed a Shipping & Payment By Customer Groups extension. As a result, we have the following payment methods for different groups:

Customer representatives feature

After the website launch, the client continues to develop his dealers network and increase sales with the help of ‘agents’ selling the shoes. We developed functionality that allows creating ‘Agent groups’, assign ‘Agents’ to these groups, provide the ability for ‘Agents’ to add new customers, as well as adding orders for customers directly in Magento.

We extended the default Magento ‘User Roles’ functionality, so the admin is enabled to create a role – ‘Agents’ and assign Agents (Users) to the Agents group.

Also, the admin can set up different permissions for the Agent group.

‘Agents’ have access only to their own ‘area’ within Magento. Specifically, they can see only ‘Customers’ and ‘Orders’ within their group. The information of other Agent groups is hidden from them.

Agents can also create their customers and place orders within one of the created B2B groups — B2B credit invoice or B2B Prepaid invoice group.

Front-end touch-up

The site design is adapted for the most popular screen resolutions. Users can easily learn more about the products on their mobile devices before buying them in-store and have no troubles using the site during the purchase procedure.

If you want to see more projects implemented by Magecom, please visit our portfolio. To get an idea of your project budget and its timeline, just drop us a line.