A B2B portal for wholesalers and distributors: orders from regular customers without a phone call

What an order from a regular customer looks like today

The customer emails a list of codes and quantities. The salesperson opens that customer’s price list, because each has a different discount. Checks with the warehouse whether everything is in. Types the order into the system, one line does not match, calls the customer. The customer asks about their balance, the salesperson asks the bookkeeper. The order goes to picking after several messages, sometimes a full two hours later.

With dozens of such orders a day, salespeople spend their time answering messages instead of selling.

What a B2B portal looks like

A portal is made of modules, meaning self-contained parts that can go live one after another. For wholesalers and distributors I usually build these:

Company and user accounts

The customer is a company, not a person. One company can have several people placing orders, an owner who sees the balance and a bookkeeper with access to invoices. You invite the company, the customer adds their own people.

A catalogue with the customer’s prices

Everyone logged in sees their own prices: the discount group’s price list, individual terms, promotions for them. They do not see other customers’ prices. Search by code, name, manufacturer’s code.

Availability

Next to each item, whether it is in stock, how many and when the next delivery arrives. Pulled from your stock program, so the customer does not order what you do not have.

A basket built for trade

Pasting a list of codes and quantities in one go. Import from the spreadsheet the customer keeps anyway. Repeating a previous order with one click. The portal says at once which lines are unavailable and suggests a substitute if you have one.

Credit limit and balance

The customer sees their limit, balance and overdue invoices. An order over the limit goes to a salesperson for approval instead of to picking. The customer does not call to ask “how much do we owe”.

Documents

Invoices, credit notes, dispatch notes, order confirmations. Downloadable at any hour, also in bulk for the month for the customer’s bookkeeper.

Status and dispatch

The customer sees whether the order is received, picked or shipped, and has a tracking number with a link.

Where the portal gets its data and where it sends it

The portal does not replace your stock or accounting program. It pulls products, prices, stock levels and invoices from them and sends back orders and new users’ details. A salesperson sees an order from the portal in the same system where they see orders from email. How such connections work, and what to do when a program cannot share data, is in the guide on system integration.

If you do not have an internal system yet and orders live in spreadsheets, the portal can be the first module of a larger system. Then salespeople get their screens and customers get theirs, on the same data. More on that in the guide on replacing spreadsheets with a system.

An example of scale

I worked on the systems of a European distributor of electronic components: over 150,000 products, customers in 19 countries, same-day dispatch. My part was the product lists and product pages, where a customer in each of those countries sees the price and stock for their own market. The name is under a non-disclosure agreement, and there is more about that project on a separate page. A portal for a wholesaler with a few thousand lines starts from the same principle at a smaller scale: every customer sees their own prices and what is really there to buy.

Where to start

With the catalogue at the customer’s prices and the basket. That moves the largest share of a salesperson’s work onto the customer. You usually get the first module after the first month, invite a few regular customers and watch where they get stuck. Balance, documents and approval of over-limit orders follow in stages.

Billing goes stage by stage: you pay for each module once you have accepted it, and the prices come in writing once the scope is written down. The bigger picture of what a customer portal does and which screens it has is on the main page of the guide. If your customers ask about job status rather than goods, see the page on order status online.

Describe in the form below how many regular customers you have and how they place orders today. I will get back to you.