Customer portals
A portal your customers use instead of calling the counter.
Contract pricing that matches the invoice, availability that is true, reorder from history, quoting and account hierarchy — built on your ERP as the source of truth, not a parallel catalog somebody has to maintain.
First production portal live in six to eight weeks with a pilot account group. Typically $75,000–$200,000.
Scope your portalWhy distributor portals get abandoned
A portal has exactly one job on day one: show this customer their price and tell them whether it is available. Get either wrong once and the buyer picks up the phone — and having done that once, they keep doing it. Every convenience feature built on top of an unreliable price is wasted budget.
Contract pricing in industrial distribution is rarely a simple list. It is a customer-specific matrix with quantity breaks, effective dates, unit-of-measure conversions, exception items negotiated three years ago and a freight rule nobody wrote down. A platform that expects a price field cannot express it, so somebody ends up maintaining a second catalog by hand.
The fix is not a better platform. It is treating the ERP as the pricing engine and building the portal as a fast, well-designed reader of it.
What a working portal includes
Foundation
Pricing and availability
Customer-specific contract price with quantity breaks and UOM conversion, plus branch-level stock with lead times for what is not on the shelf.
Daily use
Reorder and history
Order history by job, site or PO, one-click reorder, saved lists, and search that finds the part by an obsolete number the customer still uses.
Revenue
Quoting and approvals
Request a quote, convert it to an order, route it through the customer's own approval chain and spending limits without leaving the portal.
Accounts
Hierarchy and permissions
Parent companies, sites, buyers and their limits — mirroring how the customer is actually organized, including who may see pricing.
Common questions
+Why not just use a B2B e-commerce platform?
Standard platforms handle catalog and checkout well but assume simple pricing. When contract matrices, UOM conversions, substitutions and freight rules exceed what configuration can express, a custom portal is warranted — and often cheaper than fighting the platform for three years.
+How long until it is live?
Six to eight weeks to a production portal with pricing, stock and reorder for a pilot account group. Quoting, punchout and additional branches follow in two-week increments.
+Will our customers actually use it?
Adoption follows two things: the price shown matches the invoice, and availability is true. We build both against the ERP before adding any convenience features, and pilot with the accounts whose buyers order most often.
See what your portal would take.
Six guided questions return an engagement shape, a team, a timeline and an investment range — reviewed by an engineer.