best options for b2b/b2c with one cart

I've perused the forums for past messages about carts that handle retail and wholesale customers well within the same site/cart but some info is a little old and I wanted to see if there were any new recommendations. Magento was suggested by several people to me, but from reading their forums it seems like those who use it for wholesale ordering are all having to do some sort of work-around rather than it being really set up for wholesale clients.

My company is 4 years old and started out as strictly b2c. Since then we have switched to a b2b focus but still get retail orders on a daily basis, the volume of wholesale orders is just far outstrips the retail orders. I would like our wholesale customers to be able to login and when they do, they would see ws pricing only, everything would be tax-exempt, and it would calculate exact shipping based on weight for UPS for domestic orders and USPS for international orders. Then it would take their payment by credit card automatically. For the few customers we extend terms to, I would need it to allow them to "checkout" without paying and be invoiced. I also want to be able to manually add orders for a customer for just one or two customers we have that send us purchase orders and get discounts beyond the normal wholesale discounts for ordering in very large amounts.

My goal is to automate the wholesale ordering process as much as possible to reduce the need for a person to tend to these repeat customers who don't need any real help during the ordering process and for them to see accurate, automatically updated inventory levels for products. We don't have a huge amount of SKUs to manage; about 5 categories of product with a total of about 30-40 SKUs at any one time.

On the front-end, I need a cart that has good multiple product images with zoom and pop-ups or lightbox effects to highlight different product views. Part of the reason we are redesigning the site and implementing a new cart is also to try to increase our retail sales.

Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated, though I prefer a nonhosted solution and would like to try to keep the cost of a license under $2K. Open source is also fine if it has what we need. Thanks!

I use CS-Cart version 1.3.5 SP4. There is a lightbox mod (free) for your images and the cart supports multiple images for your products. A suppliers function will automate ordering from multiple suppliers. I also have a shipping mod (about $90.00) that will configure shipping for FedEX, UPS and USPS for your suppliers.

Although version 2.0.4 has been released it is still buggy and I recommend 1.3.5. A domain lifetime license is about $200.00

What is the "suppliers function" you mention? I was just playing with the demo and I see that you can create a group membership (such as wholesale clients) but not how to add special prices that only they see.

Where do you find the mods, are they third-party or from the company?
How easy is it to do highly customized designs? I will have a site done graphically in PSD files and then will just be having someone install the shopping cart, so I do need the cart to not pose problems with this methods. thanks!

I would consider 3D Cart first and foremost, although they are a hosted solution. Still, out of all the shopping carts that I have reviewed in my time, 3D cart (by far) has the most features, including the ability to manage Wholesale. If you really want to host the cart yourself, then consider Interspire because they also have a Wholesale solution. Both come with great sales/help to ensure that your cart fits your needs. Interspire packages start as low as $295 flat for the license. 3D Cart has many package options, but honestly the $99/mo one is by far the best bang for your buck and the only one of theirs that will handle wholesale.

I hope this info has helped!

These two hosted solutions are very strong in this area,in particular Volusion. they have very large module which enables you to set up multiple wholesale accounts, with different pricing levels per customer, and the whole gamut of billing options as well as shipping from multiple warehouses.

It's not the best solution for some things but it has excellent functionality for this - and can be integrated with major back end inventory management systems. I would look at the demo.