Service
B2B portal development and dealer order systems
If your dealers still place orders by phone or messaging apps, your sales team spends its day typing orders. A B2B portal gives that day back.
What a B2B portal handles
Everything that differs from retail e-commerce is on this list.
Customer-specific pricing
Every dealer sees their own price list. Discount tiers, campaigns and contract prices are defined separately.
Credit account and limits
Balance, open credit limit and payment terms. Orders over the limit go to approval automatically.
Controlled stock visibility
You control which dealer sees which warehouse and which product. Restricted items can stay hidden.
Two-way ERP flow
Orders land in the ERP; stock and account balances come back. Manual data entry disappears.
Approval workflow
A dealer employee prepares, an authorised user approves. Who approved what and when is on record.
Order history and reorder
Dealers see their own history and repeat an order in one click. Most support calls disappear here.
A B2B portal is not the “dealer edition” of a webshop
The most common mistake is trying to use an existing retail e-commerce platform as a dealer portal. It looks fine at first: there are products, a cart, orders. Then the first price difference arrives.
In a retail platform, price belongs to the product. In B2B, price belongs to the intersection of product and customer. The same item is three different prices for three dealers, and that price shifts with discount tier, contract and sometimes order quantity. Forcing this into a retail platform creates manual work on every price change.
The second difference is payment: retail is paid upfront, B2B runs on credit accounts. An order passes before money is collected, so the system has to know balance, limit and payment terms. The third is approval: a dealer’s staff member prepares an order and a manager approves it. A retail cart has no such step.
Building these three in from the start is markedly cheaper than adding them later — because all three change the data model, not the screen.
What drives the cost
When you request a quote, ask which of these are included.
- Pricing complexity. One list, per-dealer discounts, or quantity tiers? This is the single biggest development driver.
- Depth of ERP integration. Push orders only, or also pull stock, balances and invoices? The second option grows the project noticeably.
- Dealer count and role structure. Multiple users and permission levels inside each dealer means more admin screens.
- The state of your product data. If variants, bundles and units of measure are messy, the real work is cleaning the data.
- Mobile usage. If field teams enter orders, the interface has to be designed mobile-first.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a B2B portal cost?
It depends on scope, and the honest answer is “not without seeing it”. What we can tell you is what moves the number: pricing complexity and the depth of ERP integration dominate the budget; dealer count and role structure come next. A portal with one price list and push-only order transfer is a fraction of one with per-dealer contract pricing and two-way ERP sync. We break this down line by line during discovery.
Can we turn our existing webshop into a dealer portal?
To a limited extent. If a single dealer price list and upfront payment are enough, it can be built on your current platform. But once you need per-dealer pricing, credit accounts and approval flows, a retail platform starts to strain — because those three change the DATA MODEL, not the screen. In that case a separate portal is cheaper over time. We measure which case you are in during discovery.
Is there an off-the-shelf B2B product, or must it be custom?
Off-the-shelf products exist and they work well for standard needs. Custom development makes sense when your pricing rules are more specific than a packaged product supports, your ERP offers no standard connector, or your dealer count has pushed subscription costs above the cost of building. If a packaged product is enough, we will say so — even when it means less work for us.
Our dealers are not tech-savvy. Will they use it?
Adoption is decided by two things: interface simplicity and reorder. If a dealer can see a past order and repeat it in one click, the portal is adopted quickly; if every order has to be built from scratch, they go back to the phone. That is why our first release puts most of its effort into exactly those two things. Expect phone orders to continue during the transition — plan for it rather than fighting it.
When does an order reach the ERP?
Either on approval or in real time, depending on the design. What actually matters is the failure case: if the ERP does not respond, the order must not vanish — it should sit in a queue and retry automatically, and raise an alert past a threshold. An integration that fails silently is more dangerous than no integration at all; the same team runs our integration work.
Let’s map your dealer flow
Tell us how your dealers order today and how prices are set. We will say clearly which steps can be automated and what an off-the-shelf product already covers.