A new eCommerce revolution? OroCommerce for B2B

Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner have fundamentally changed the market for eCommerce solutions with Magento. Originating from a small web agency in Los Angeles, Magento has become the eCommerce solution with the highest market share worldwide.

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We know the story: Magento was externally financed, greatly expanded, went through various incarnations such as Magento GO and Magento Professional and was sold to eBay Enterprise. Shortly afterwards, Yoav left, and later Roy too. While Roy went quiet for a while, Yoav soon founded a new start-up, Oro. Oro basically had two products, the Oro platform and Oro CRM, a CRM solution based on it, which is specially tailored to the needs of eCommerce platform operators. Both products are relatively new, but we used them very early on at AOE and had very good experiences. We quickly realized that these are people who know what they are doing.

A burning market need: a B2B eCommerce solution

I have been waiting a long time to see a market player come up with a dedicated (open source) B2B eCommerce solution. The market is literally crying out for it: While there are many solutions that cover B2B functionalities, they are either proprietary, expensive and simply “so 2010” or a combination of these.

Nowadays, we build B2B projects with Magento and do so very successfully. The general advantages of Magento far outweigh the disadvantages of a more B2C-oriented solution. However, there are not many service providers, especially in the enterprise sector, who can implement large B2B eCommerce projects with integration into peripheral systems and a global focus. And for smaller B2B eCommerce projects, the adaptation costs for Magento to B2B are sometimes quite high.

According to the announcement, OroCommerce is now filling this gap and it is very likely that they will succeed in repeating a similar feat to Magento once again.

Do it again!

What speaks in favor of this? The following:

1. Yoav has done it before: he was the lead architect behind Magento (even if Magento’s concepts are of course not beyond all doubt), he knows the trick. He also knows all the madness that happens on the way from a small company to a global market leader.
2. With the Oro Platform, Oro has created a strong product on which other solutions are based. The most prominent representative is Akeneo, an open source PIM that is already very successfully filling a gap in the open source Tookit.
3. The market demands an open source eCommerce solution in the B2B sector.
4. Oro already has partners who have a certain proximity to B2B eCommerce. These include the largest, most successful open source service providers in the US and EMEA.

We will continue our aggressive growth plans demonstrated in our OroCRM roadmap. We invite the Oro Community to follow the progress of OroCommerce and join us as we create the world’s first and best Open Source B2B Commerce Platform.

OroCommerce announcement from today, 08.04.2015

Range of functions

At the moment, we don’t know much about the range of functions. The following functions are planned:

1. Fully personalized customer experience
   1. Built-in flexible content management
   2. Several price lists
   3. Contract framework pricing
   4. Configurable payment terms
   5. Personalized product catalogs
   6. Configurable order process
2. Quick order forms
3. Optimized offer-order workflow
4. Business customer account with configurable roles, authorizations and workflows
5. Reports, dashboards and data analysis
6. Multi-business / multi-brand websites (including catalog websites)
7. Powerful segmentation engine
8. Multiple departments and flexible access control lists

That sounds very promising. Every service provider that implements B2B projects regularly encounters precisely these requirements.

When will it be released?

There is no official release date at the moment. However, we can assume that this date is not too far in the future. In the meantime, you can already register for a launch notification on orocommerce.com. I am excited!