Building a B2B portal: ordering, quotes and documents in one place

Business customers order differently from consumers. They have their own price agreements, order largely the same things every month, have a quote approved by someone else and want to find last quarter's invoice without sending an email. In many companies that still runs via the phone, via email with an order form in Excel, and via a sales office that retypes everything into the ERP.

A B2B portal is the place where your business customers do that themselves: order, accept quotes, find documents and report problems. This article explains how such a portal differs from a webshop and a client portal, which features belong in it, why roles per client organisation matter so much, how it connects to your ERP or accounting software and what it costs.

B2B portal, webshop or client portal?

The terms get mixed up, so first the differences.

• A webshop is public, shows a catalogue with fixed prices and takes payment straight away. It's built to get new customers to buy.
• A client portal sits behind a login and is mainly about insight: documents, statuses and messages for existing clients.
• A B2B portal is a client portal in which existing business customers also order and handle quotes, at their own prices, on account and with their own approval steps.

In practice they overlap. The name matters less than the question of what your customers should be able to do themselves. Some webshop platforms have a B2B module with customer groups and tiered pricing. If you mainly sell from a catalogue and your price agreements are simple, that's often enough. It starts to fall short when prices per customer come from your ERP, when you make a lot of custom quotes, when there are approval steps on the customer's side, or when service and documents matter at least as much as ordering.

What a B2B portal does

Ordering at customer-specific prices

After logging in, the customer sees their own range, their own prices and their own discounts. Those prices come straight from your ERP or accounting software, so there's no second price list for someone to maintain. Payment is on account, as the customer is used to, and the order lands in your system without retyping.

Repeat orders and order lists

For many business customers this is the feature they use most. A fixed order list, repeating a previous order with one click, or quick ordering by item number without clicking through a catalogue. A buyer who orders the same thirty lines every week doesn't want to search. They want to adjust and send.

Viewing and accepting quotes

Quotes live in the portal instead of as a PDF in someone's inbox. The customer sees the lines and terms, can ask questions and accepts with one click. If a manager on the customer's side needs to approve first, that step is in there too. Once accepted, the quote becomes an order straight away, without anyone on your side entering anything again.

Documents in one place

Invoices, delivery notes, certificates, manuals and contracts, findable per order. That sounds modest, but it removes a good share of the emails a sales office gets today. Could you send that invoice again? Which certificate belonged to that delivery?

Service requests

A B2B portal can also be a service portal. The customer reports a fault or a return for a product they bought from you, with serial number and photo, and then follows the status. Because the portal knows what the customer bought, nobody has to work out first which machine it's about.

Access for dealers and partners

If you work with dealers, resellers or installers, a partner portal is a variant on the same foundation. Partners order for their own customers, see their own purchase prices and margins, and find product information and marketing material there. It's the same technology with a different role.

You don't need to build everything at once. Pick the feature that costs the most manual work today, and start there. How we approach it is on the page about client portals.

Roles per client organisation

This is the biggest difference from a consumer webshop. In a B2B portal it isn't the customer who logs in, but an employee of the customer. The buyer may order up to a certain amount, the finance department only sees invoices, the director approves large orders and the technician reports faults but orders nothing. Ideally the customer manages their own users: an administrator on their side adds new colleagues and removes people who have left, without your sales office getting a call about it.

An example from our own work. For Premium Yacht Supply, which sources parts for superyachts and delivers worldwide, we built a platform where access is organised per vessel, not per person. The captain and crew each have their own login, but see the orders for their vessel. When the crew changes, the history stays with the ship. In the quote, the client sees supplier price, commission, freight and VAT separately. Approval happens in the portal, after which purchase order, tracking, delivery and invoicing follow.

In a B2B portal the customer is an organisation, not a person. Set that up properly from the start and you won't have to update every staff change at a customer by hand.

Connecting to your ERP or accounting software

The portal is the shop window; the truth lives in your ERP or accounting software. That's where the customers, the price agreements, the stock and the invoices are. A good B2B portal fetches that data from there and writes orders back. The order status and the invoice then come back to the portal by themselves.

Agree per data type which system is the source of truth. Prices and customer data belong in the ERP, not in the portal. Also decide how current stock needs to be: per minute, or is a lead time per item enough? How easy your ERP is to connect determines a good share of the work. A package with a well-documented API is a few days' work, a system without an API many times that. More on that on the page about connecting systems.

What it costs and how long it takes

• Discovery: free. We walk through your ordering process, your customers and your systems and make the first version concrete.
• Build: from € 9,500, with a fixed price you get up front. One customer group with ordering and documents sits at the lower end; multiple roles, quotes and service requests higher.
• Lead time: a first working version is live in four to eight weeks on average.
• Hosting: usually € 20 to € 80 per month. If you want to keep extending the portal, that's possible in a partnership from € 3,500 per month.

The price is driven mainly by the roles and the integrations, not by the number of screens. With a custom build you also don't pay a licence per user. In a B2B portal, where every customer has several accounts, that adds up quickly. A fuller explanation with a checklist for your quote is in what it costs to have a client portal built.

When it doesn't pay off (yet)

• You have a handful of business customers who order once a month. Then a phone call is quicker than a portal.
• You sell from a fixed catalogue with simple prices. Then a webshop platform's B2B module is probably enough.
• Your ordering process still changes every few months. Pin it down first, then build.
• Your ERP can't be connected and replacing it is already planned. Then wait for the new package.

Where to start

1. For one month, count how orders, quote approvals and document requests come in, and how much time they take.
2. Pick one customer group and one feature for the first version. Often that's repeat orders or documents.
3. Ask which integration options your ERP or accounting package has.
4. Write down which roles exist on your customers' side and what each role may do.
5. Let a few regular customers use the first version, and build on what they actually do.

With those five points on paper, one conversation is enough to know what the first version should be and what it costs. How we build portals, with examples of what they can do, is on the page about having a client portal or B2B portal built.