Wondering where we’ve been? We’ve been making BIG moves for our BIG Launch!

Today we are launching the Buyer Portal, which is a new version of B2B Editions Buyer features, Multi storefront support for all stores, and our Headless offering is going into Beta!

Optimize Your B2B Buyer Experience with the Buyer Portal

The new B2B Edition Buyer Portal brings the most modern B2B buyer experience of any e-commerce platform to BigCommerce merchants, allowing you to automate administrative processes while streamlining the buyer-merchant relationship to more efficiently manage orders, quotes and workflows to reduce operational burden and influence customer loyalty and conversion. 

In addition to the existing B2B customer tools, the Buyer Portal allows you to quickly customize the buyer portal experience to match your brand and business process. Some of these configurations include:

  • B2B account portal — personalize the colors and branding of the Buyer Portal in your storefront with new design settings 

  • Account registration forms — specify whether B2C customers, B2B buyers, or both can apply for a personal or business account, require approval of new Company registrations, and customize the information fields on each registration form

  • Login page — configure page text, button colors, and custom HTML regions on the login page used by B2C and B2B customers in your storefront

  • Action buttons — alter the color, text, location, and visibility for your storefront quote and shopping list buttons

  • Control functionally by channel – create unique experiences per B2B channel with storefront-specific Buyer Portal controls. 

These features are theme agnostic, allowing you to configure a unique experience for each of your storefronts with any BigCommerce theme.   

The Buyer Portal is now available for new stores. We will extend this offering to current stores starting June 1st as we prepare a migration path. Stay tuned for more details.

Please note that the buyer portal does not include the Invoicing feature. We expect this to launch in July 2023.

Manage Your B2B Storefronts In One Place

In November 2022, we launched B2B Edition’s multi-storefront capabilities in Closed Beta. This provided merchants the ability to provide storefront-specific functionality to support B2B, B2C, and hybrid use cases across multiple channels from one control panel. 

Now that Multi-Storefront is available to all B2B Edition users, you can easily launch and manage multiple storefronts from a single BigCommerce back-end across brands, locales, and customer segments at a much lower operational cost and complexity than with separate stores. Additionally, you can use B2B Edition’s storefront-specific settings to create unique B2B buyer experiences in each of your storefronts. Please reach out to your BigCommerce account representative to purchase additional B2B Edition storefronts.

Beta Opportunity: B2B Edition for Headless Storefronts

We’re excited to announce the closed beta of headless storefront support for B2B Edition. This allows B2B Edition users to extend the front-end buyer tools of the B2B Edition app to multiple headless storefronts, while managing their back-end processes from the BigCommerce control panel.

What’s included in this Beta?

By participating in this closed beta, B2B Edition’s Buyer Portal will be added to your desired headless storefronts via a script. After this, all of the buyer-side functionality available with B2B Edition for native BigCommerce storefronts will become accessible on your headless storefronts, including:

  • A Company account portal with customizable colors, buttons, and branding

  • Personalized login pages and application forms for B2C and B2B customer accounts

  • Tools for quick and seamless quote requests, shopping list creation, and order submission

  • User and address management tools for Company admins

  • Support for Multi-Storefront, including storefront-specific design settings for the Buyer Portal

B2B Edition can be used with any headless framework, and it can integrate into an existing CMS platform by using the Buyer Portal API to further personalize the buyer purchasing experience.

Who qualifies for this Beta?

In order to use B2B Edition with headless storefronts, your store must meet the following criteria:

  • Your store must be on one of these plans:

    • Enterprise (production, sandbox, or trial)

    • Partner sandbox

  • You must have the B2B Edition app installed and provisioned in your store.

  • The Buyer Portal experience must be enabled.

  • Your store must use Script Manager webhooks and APIs.

  • If you are using Multi-Storefront and have existing storefronts provisioned with B2B Edition, you will need additional B2B Edition and BigCommerce storefront licenses to activate B2B Edition on your headless storefront.

  • Your store must not be using B2B Edition’s Invoice functionality.

  • The Edit Channelspermission must be enabled in your user account in order to edit settings for individual storefronts. Only the store owner can enable this permission for other users.

The Invoice functionality is currently not supported with the Buyer Portal in native and headless storefronts. This will be added in a future release.

How do I sign up?

Fill out this form to register your interest in the closed beta. If you meet the eligibility criteria, the BigCommerce Product Team will contact you via email with information about how to get started.