B2B portal
What is a B2B portal?
A B2B portal is a closed online shop for trade customers: the buyer signs in and sees the prices agreed with them, their discount, their payment terms and their order history. The catalogue and the stock are the same as in the public shop, but the price and the conditions differ per account. The portal replaces orders taken by phone and by email, and records every one of them in one place.
Example
An importer of building chemicals works with 60 dealers. Orders arrive by phone, by email and over chat, and somebody types each one into the inventory program again. At 300 orders a month and six minutes of typing each, that is 30 hours; at an internal cost of €10 an hour it is around €300 a month, before counting the wrong item codes and the calls that open with a question about what was actually shipped.
With a portal the dealer signs in, sees their own price list and the stock, orders without help and gets a confirmation with a number. The retyping disappears, and picking errors fall because the customer chooses from the catalogue instead of describing goods in words. The amounts are illustrative; the effect you notice first is that orders stop depending on who picks up the phone.
Why it matters for a business
What separates this from an ordinary shop is price and terms. In B2B trade the same item carries a different price per customer or per customer group, quantity breaks, an agreed discount on a brand, a minimum order value, a credit limit and payment on terms. Prices are usually shown without VAT, and for customers elsewhere in the EU a valid VAT number is checked before the intra-EU rules are applied.
The portal also earns its place through data: who orders what, which items sit untouched in the catalogue, which dealer has not ordered for three months. None of that exists in an inbox. Customer price lists come from the inventory or ERP system, so a price has one source rather than two.
A portal like this is bespoke, and we build it as web software joined to the system where the prices and the stock already live.
What to ask
- Where do customer prices come from, and which system owns them?
- How is a credit limit handled, and what does the customer see when they pass it?
- Are prices shown without VAT, and how are EU customers treated?
- Can a customer repeat a past order and keep their own list of items?
- Who on the customer side gets an account, and what can each account do?