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B2b ecommerce software needs to have a few extra features that are not necessary for b2c software.

The main extra features that are needed in b2b ecommerce software are customer accounts, individual customer discounts, and the ability to hide prices from non business visitors.

You can hide the entire catalogue from visitors until they are logged in, or alternatively maintain your site as a brochure  but hide the prices. You will probably also need the facility to set different discount rates for different customers or groups of customers.

B2b ecommerce software is used in a situation where as a manufacturer or wholesaler, you  sell exclusively or mainly to other businesses, who then sell on to the retail or end customer. You obviously do not want the retail customer to have access to the wholesale prices, but nevertheless you need your website to be on the internet and indexed by the search engines.

In this situation your customer can request a password from you for their account. Once approved by you, they are sent their password and can then use it to log on  to the website and view the prices, and, depending on the b2b ecommerce software used, number of items in stock.

Some commercial shopping cart software  manufacturers charge extra for this functionality, while some free ecommerce software, including osCommerce and Zen Cart have this facility available out of the box. For instance Actinic Catalog retails at £399, whereas Actinic Business, which has the needed facilities for customer logins and hiding prices from retail customers retails at £799.

Whether you go for open source or paid ecommerce software, you need to go for a database driven serve based system rather than a PC based system (such as Actinic),  as companies that you will be dealing with will need to know up to the minute prices and stock situations.