The question isn't whether your manufacturing or distribution company needs B2B ecommerce—it's whether your platform is built to handle the complexities of your business. If your IT team is spending more time on maintenance than innovation, or if marketing is constantly constrained by the platform, it's time to consider a better path forward.
Many manufacturers started with Magento because it was a known, open-source platform. However, when it comes to the complex and unique needs of B2B, such as —contract pricing, bulk ordering, and deep ERP integration, Magento often falls short.
Adage is committed to helping manufacturers find advanced solutions that can serve you well into the future. For the majority of our manufacturing and distribution clients, that has meant replatforming to one of three powerful, B2B-specific platforms : Optimizely Configured Commerce, Znode, or Umbraco.
The Replatforming Imperative: Why Magento Is a Stopgap and not a Solution The core challenge for manufacturers is that a successful B2B website must be able to act as a single source of truth for both customers and internal teams (e.g. sales and customer service). For many, the open-source nature of Magento forces them to treat their website like a constantly customized B2C system, leading to high-friction workflows and enormous technical debt.
This is why we see both CTOs and CMOs looking for alternatives.
The Pain Points of Staying on Magento1. High Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Driven by Plugin Dependency
Magento's B2B features, such as they are, often require costly and complex third-party extensions. These essential plugins become the source of technical debt and instability:
Custom Pricing & Catalog Segmentation: Features like Shared Catalogs or Tailored Pricing/Price per Client for specific customer groups are crucial but often require specialized extensions. This fragmentation makes it difficult to maintain pricing accuracy and integrity across the site.
Request for Quote (RFQ) & Purchase Approvals: Implementing a complete B2B Quotation System or setting up Purchase Approval Workflows and limits for company accounts requires third-party plugins. Every custom workflow added to the core system increases the risk of bugs and costly maintenance.
Quick Ordering & Requisition Lists: For manufacturers, the ability to rapidly order by SKU upload or leverage saved Requisition Lists is mandatory for power buyers. While some B2B suites include this, relying on separate extensions adds complexity to the checkout flow.
ERP Integration: Connecting mission-critical data like real-time inventory, complex contract pricing, and order history requires a stable, API-first architecture, which is difficult to achieve with a platform relying on multiple third-party hooks and extensions.
While Magento’s initial license cost can appear lower than some competitors, the true cost quickly escalates. The need for numerous third-party plugins and ongoing custom development means that what starts as a cost-effective solution often becomes significantly more expensive over time—sometimes surpassing the TCO of more robust, B2B-specific platforms. This is especially true as business needs evolve and the complexity of integrations grows.
2. IT Burden
The fragmented architecture and plugin reliance mean IT teams spend more time fixing the site than enhancing the site. Manufacturing organizations that move to a B2B platform often note an immediate shift, stating that their developers became more agile and can push releases l and add value on a regular basis.
Additionally, Magento’s architecture, originally designed for B2C, can struggle under the demands of B2B commerce—especially during high-traffic events like sales or product launches. Many manufacturers report that their Magento sites experience slowdowns or even outages during peak periods, which can directly impact revenue and customer trust. In contrast, modern B2B platforms are engineered to scale reliably and handle complex, high-volume transactions without compromising performance.
3. Marketing Constraints
The content management experience is often clunky. Marketing and merchandising teams are frequently dependent on IT to make updates, slowing down speed-to-market for campaigns and product launches.
Manufacturers need a platform built with B2B logic at its core. Adage, as a partner committed to constantly adapting and evolving, guides clients to one of these three modern architectures.
1. Optimizely Configured Commerce: The Enterprise DXP Leader
Best For: Enterprise B2B companies prioritizing a comprehensive Digital Experience Platform (DXP), personalization, and powerful features out-of-the-box.
The Advantage: Optimizely natively integrates commerce with a best-in-class CMS, A/B testing, and AI-driven personalization. If your focus is on world-class B2C-like experience for your B2B buyers, Optimizely is the clear choice.
2. Znode: The Multi-Store, Complex Data Specialist
Best For: Companies with highly complex, unique pricing models, vast product catalogs, and the need to manage many brands or channels from one back-office.
The Advantage: Znode is purpose-built B2B commerce, featuring an API-first, headless architecture. A key selling factor for one manufacturer was Znode's ability to be a headless system that was easier to maintain and update.
Proven Impact: Znode customers gained an average annual benefit of $3 million.
Team Productivity: Marketing and merchandising teams became 43% more productive due to self-service functionality, allowing them to update content and pricing without IT support.
IT Efficiency: IT platform support and management teams worked with 45% greater efficiency, reducing the effort needed to maintain and scale the platform.
3. Umbraco: The Content-First, .NET Native Choice
Best For: Manufacturers whose digital success hinges on rich, complex product content and who are already aligned with the Microsoft (.NET) technology stack.
The Advantage: Umbraco's strength lies in its CMS, making it a dream for marketers who need to easily manage technical documentation, guides, and product content alongside the transaction. Its native .NET foundation is highly appealing to IT for seamless integration with existing enterprise tools (like Microsoft Dynamics ERP or Azure infrastructure). It provides a flexible and scalable platform , including a commerce option that can be customized to meet specific B2B needs, including customer login, customized price lists, and ERP integration.
You don't need to try and figure out which platform is right for you alone. At Adage we begin all partnerships with a strategy engagement where we seek to understand your unique business rules, complex pricing, and integration requirements.
We act as the translator, simplifying technical language and complex digital solutions to find the right tool that will solve your specific challenges.
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If Your Top Priority Is... |
You Should Consider... |
Strategic Differentiator |
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Ultimate DXP, Personalization & A/B Testing |
Optimizely Configured Commerce |
Enterprise Experience |
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Unique Data Models, Multi-Store & Flexibility |
Znode |
B2B Complexity & Scale |
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Content-First Strategy & .NET Native |
Umbraco |
IT/Marketing Synergy |
Would you like to schedule a no-cost, 30-minute consultation to assess your current Magento platform's TCO and begin matching your business complexity to the ideal B2B alternative?
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