Search Requirements for a B2B Retailer

Klevu work with a number of successful B2B retailers, who sell large volumes to trade customers and distributors through their ecommerce store. B2B customers often have completely different requirements around ecommerce and this is no different for search. So, after a few recent B2B implementations, we thought we’d write a piece focused on some of the functionality that we’ve built into our product in order to cater for our B2B customers.

Group Prices

B2B stores will typically have multiple customer groups – allowing for different pricing, products, discounts, availability etc. These customers will see prices based on the allocation from the store, instead of a one-price-fits-all price and this context also needs to be handled within search.

The challenge we had a search provider was to be able to show the assigned customer group prices, based on the customer’s credentials without requiring our customers to do any specific work. It was very important that this would work out of the box.

With the help of our partners and our in-house expertise, we came up with a solution that allows such group prices to automatically work with Klevu. The Klevu Magento plugin fetches the group prices and, at the time of showing the search results, Klevu’s javascript determines the relevant price for rendering. We’ve also ensure that this works in Ajax / quick search as well, as this was an important requirement.

Searching for SKU

Another feature requirements we have seen that’s particularly relevant for b2b customers is providing an option to search directly for a product code (i.e. SKU). Klevu allows for this via its configuration panel, where users can add SKU in search coverage, allowing the option to show SKU within the search results.

Native or Preserved layout

B2B stores typically have several relevant functional elements on their landing page, as their customers are very much used to seeing uniformity and consistency across pages. As a result of this, they often also want search landing pages to look exactly the same as any other category landing page. The difference in experience across the different page templates can confuse customers.

The challenge doesn’t require any adjustments to the look and feel through CSS enhancements (which Klevu allows for out of the box). With Klevu, you can just select the ‘Preserve theme layout option’ in the configuration panel in the Magento admin area to enable this feature.

Klevu, in this case, Upon receiving a search query, will apply its proprietary search algorithm to identify the most suitable results and sends the respective product-IDs back to your Magento instance. The Magento instance of the store then renders the landing page with Klevu’s suggested results. This serves the purpose of preserving the theme layout including all of the functional elements.

Grid view layout

Customers of b2b stores are often looking more for specific products and expect more than just browsing through keyword suggestions – they also want to be able to quickly filter the results to narrow down to particular choices. Klevu tackles this challenge by providing multiple structural UI for search results. Our customers refer to it as instant faceted search.

Klevu allows users to generate dynamic facets for quick search with respective product suggestions. Klevu also allows retailers to map multiple additional attributes to display in facets. At the time of rendering search results, Klevu, of course shows the relevant attributes. It is also possible to decide the order of facets as per business logic.

Conclusion

B2B merchants often have completely different requirements and these are some of the ones that are often compromised when using other technology, especially the out of the box search solutions within most mainstream platforms. We’re always looking to improve our search solution and welcome feature suggestions – which have helped us to cater for the needs of the B2B companies we work with.

If you have any questions around any of these points or about our product in general, please feel free to get in touch with us at contact@klevu.com