Revolutionizing B2B Ecommerce: BigCommerce's B2B Edition Open Source Buyer Portal

Katie Hoesley

Introducing: the B2B Edition Open Source Buyer Portal! This exciting release was initially announced as “coming soon” as part of The Next Big Thing, and is available as of Tuesday, May 7, 2024. BigCommerce’s B2B Edition is the only Enterprise focused open source B2B buyer portal application backed by a robust set of SaaS APIs.

This release allows developers to create customized buyer experience using the source code of our Buyer Portal, minimizing the costs of solving for complex B2B needs. We provide a robust foundation for you to innovate on top of and customize to your unique business needs, allowing developers and brands to be agile and remain competitive in the ever-evolving B2B ecommerce landscape. 

What is B2B Edition? 

BigCommerce's B2B Edition is a suite of out-of-the-box functionalities designed to enhance the online purchasing experience for digitally-native buyers. 

This suite, available for both single and multi-storefronts, offers flexibility and modernization opportunities for suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers without the heavy investments typically associated with legacy platforms.

Why Open Source the Buyer Portal?

Our out-of-the-box Buyer Portal offers simplicity and ease of use, which caters to brands that want to get set up quickly with minimal technical expertise. But, what if you want to use this as your base and innovate on top of it? Alas, the Open Source Buyer Portal! 

We are accelerating innovation and flexibility in the Enterprise B2B ecommerce space by open sourcing our B2B Edition’s Buyer Portal. It allows devs to build customized buying experiences to meet whatever their business needs are and accelerate innovation and flexibility in Enterprise B2B ecommerce.

B2B Buyer Portal Gif

B2B Edition’s Buyer Portal isn’t the first big open source project at BigCommerce this year - in fact, it will be one of many. Open source projects, in general, put a lot of power and flexibility into the hands of developers. We rely on our partners and our Developer Community to innovate and build cool things to fill in gaps they see in what we offer out-of-the-box, and this project is the latest addition to areas we invite innovation.

By making the B2B buyer portal source code available, we enable our robust partner network to assist Enterprise B2B businesses in customizing their B2B buying experiences without starting from scratch. This addresses the need for flexibility required to solve for unique business specific challenges. 

Key Benefits

  • Reduced Operational Costs: By leveraging open-source solutions, businesses can significantly reduce operational and development costs.

  • Increased Flexibility: Providing developers a jumping off point they can innovate on top of provides businesses the flexibility they need to build solutions for unique use cases that aren’t provided for in the out-of-the-box solution. 

  • Improved Efficiency: Streamlined purchasing processes result in enhanced efficiency in B2B transactions.

  • Enhanced Customer Experiences: Customized buying experiences lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

  • Developers Love Open Source: Open source projects benefit from quality contributions from active developer communities, like ours! This leads to enhanced features, up-to-date documentation and quicker feedback loops with our internal development teams.

What’s next?

Want to get started? Start building!

Head over to Github and clone the BigCommerce Edition B2B Buyer Portal repository to get started, or check out the documentation to learn more before you dive in. 

Here are some resources you might find useful: 

If you have questions, feedback, or issues implementing, please reach out to our DevRel team.