Magento as we know supports B2C Business Scenarios by default. Both Magento Community and Enterprise has out of the box features to serve General Consumers in the ecommerce website. However Magento supports a concept called ‘Customer Group’ through which it can be configured for a Special Login for Wholesalers or Retailers where they can see and purchase products in bulk at a Discounted Price. Also being an Open Source Platform, Magento can be easily customized for B2B Business.
Now one of the key questions to support these scenarios within Magento is- How these Wholesalers/Retailers going to pay you for their Order? Obviously the solution will not be Credit Card Payment.
Magento is having some in-built payment plugin like PayPal, Authorize, Google Checkout and some other Payment Gateways can also be easily configured in Magento, like SagePay, Amazon Checkout, Ogone, etc., but nothing of these will be any solution when we talk about Wholesale/B2B Business Scenarios.
In any average B2B Business, a Customer (Company/Organization in this case) contributes a good amount of business each year, so the relationship between the Business (Merchant) and the Customer is much closer and stable. In most of the cases payment made by end customer is monthly or quarterly while their contacts place the Orders as and when customer require through Credits.
The ERP systems used by eCommerce Businesses has the provision of Credit Limit which can be assigned against each Customer Company, and when you introduce the portal so that your B2B contacts can Order their products, these Contacts also expect to Place Sales Order under Credit.
So is there any possibility to use ERP Customer Credit Limit as Payment Method in Magento?
Well, the answer is yes and below we have shown how to do that.
Use Store Credits to use as the Payment Method in Magento, ERP Credit Limit can be manually entered or auto synced to Magento eCommerce
Set this Credit Limit against the Magento Users through the Magento Admin Panel
Email Notifications will be sent to the users regarding this update
Customer can see their Store Credit through ‘My Account’ section, also they will be able to see the Balance as well as usage history of Store Credits
Customers can use this Store Credit while placing Sales Order, for B2B Scenarios, Users should be able to use the Store Credit as per their requirement. For B2C Scenarios, users should be able to use a percentage of the Shopping Cart total as the maximum Store Credits that they can use. Otherwise it may happen that the Customer is paying $0 because whole amount they have paid through Store Credit.
