Trade buyers have changed how they want to order. In a Gartner sales survey, 67% of B2B buyers said they prefer a rep-free experience, and the same research found that 70% prefer a completely digital, self-service buying experience. The buyer at your customer’s business wants to see their prices, place the order and download the invoice without waiting for a phone call back.
Most wholesalers and distributors still run trade orders through email, phone calls, PDF price lists and an accounting package. It works, but every order passes through a person, and every customer gets a slightly different experience depending on who answers.
A B2B ordering portal changes that. It is a private marketplace behind a login, on your own domain, where approved trade customers see your catalogue at their own prices and order for themselves. This checklist follows a trade customer from opening an account to their tenth repeat order, and sets out what your ordering portal should handle at each stage. For each one, it compares the usual setup with what a single portal does instead.
Why email and price lists stop scaling
The email-and-spreadsheet setup has real strengths. It is flexible, customers know how to use it, and it costs nothing to start. The trouble shows up as the customer list grows.
Price lists multiply: one for retailers, one for trade, one for key accounts, each a PDF that is out of date as soon as a supplier changes a price. Orders arrive in every format, from a photo of a handwritten list to a forwarded email chain, and someone has to re-key each one. Customers ring to ask where their order is and email to ask for a copy of an invoice. The sales team spends its day on admin rather than on selling.
A private B2B marketplace takes that admin off the team by letting customers do the routine work themselves, with the rules you set.
The checklist: a trade customer, stage by stage
1. Opening a trade account
Every trade relationship starts with an account. You usually need the company name, company number, VAT number, trading address and perhaps a resale certificate or proof of trade before you extend trade pricing.
Look for an application form you build yourself, with file uploads for supporting documents and required fields nobody can skip. You should be able to choose whether new accounts open straight away or wait for your review, and change that setting whenever you like. If you review, every approve or decline should be recorded with a reason, and approving a customer should put them straight onto the right price tier, with the catalogue and prices that tier allows. Sign-ups should be checked for bots before they reach your review queue.
Your trading terms belong here too. Each customer’s acceptance should be stored with the date and where it came from, and when your terms change, customers should be asked to accept the new version before they carry on ordering.
2. One account for the buyer’s whole company
Your customer is a business, not a person. A single trade account might have a purchasing manager, two buyers and someone in accounts payable, all needing access.
Look for organisation accounts: one account per customer company, with its own owners and people underneath. The company should hold its own payment method, so whatever its buyers order bills to the business rather than to the individual, and the owners should decide who in their company is allowed to use it. When a buyer leaves the customer’s business, the owners remove them without asking you.
3. Prices that follow the customer
Tiered pricing is the heart of wholesale. Retailers, trade customers and distributors each pay a different price for the same product, and your key accounts often have terms nobody else sees.
Your ordering portal should let you define customer tiers and price products per tier, so each customer sees their own price when they sign in. Some tiers should stay off the public list, so only your team can put a customer on them. Every page and document can be limited to particular tiers, so a key account price list or range brochure is visible only to key accounts.
You also decide how much the public sees. Some wholesalers run the whole portal behind a login. Others keep some pages public, so prospective customers can see what you sell and then apply for an account.
4. A catalogue buyers can find their way around
Trade buyers know what they want and want to find it quickly. A good catalogue does most of the selling for you.
Look for custom product fields, such as brand, pack size or material, so details stay consistent across the catalogue. A search box in the portal header should find products by name and bring up everything in a category. You should be able to build your shop’s home page from rows of products and category tiles, such as new lines, your own picks or what is on offer, and make it the portal’s front page. If you keep part of the catalogue public, each product page should carry its own title, description and structured data so search engines find it.
5. Checkout that raises the order value
Trade orders are often repeat orders, and small improvements at checkout add up across hundreds of them.
Look for shipping rates you control: a default delivery charge, free or cheaper delivery above an order total, and a rate of its own for particular customer tiers. The cart should apply the cheapest rate the buyer qualifies for and tell them how much more to spend for a better one, which is one of the simplest ways to lift the average order. Checkout suggestions let you offer up to six related products or categories the buyer has not already added, each added with one click.
Discount and promo codes should work against particular product categories or customer plans, with your own limits on who can redeem them and for how long, so a promotion on a new range does not leak into everything else. Saved payment methods mean repeat orders go through without anybody re-entering anything.
6. Bulk and custom orders that need a price
Not every order fits a price list. Pallet quantities, custom specifications and project orders need a quote.
Your portal should let customers request a quote through a form you design, with the detail you need to put a figure on it. The request arrives in your queue with everything attached. You build the quote and send it, and the customer accepts or declines it in the portal. A declined quote goes back for a revised one, and every version is kept. An accepted quote becomes a job with the stages you set, so the customer can watch it move towards delivery without ringing to ask where it is.
7. Order handling your team can keep up with
Once orders come in through the portal, your team needs a clear way to work through them.
Look for order management where you approve orders yourself or let them approve automatically, then mark them delivered, cancel them, or record them as paid or refunded. Customers should follow each order’s status, totals and payment details from their own purchases page. The emails customers receive when an order is received, approved, delivered or cancelled should be in your own words and sent from your own address. A daily digest that lists the orders waiting to be approved or delivered means nothing sits unnoticed in a queue.
8. Invoices, VAT and your books
Invoicing is where B2B ordering most often falls back to manual work. A good portal should handle invoicing and payments as part of every order.
Orders and accepted quotes should raise their own invoices with your details on them. Tax should be worked out per line, with your rates and how they apply, and the rate charged kept on the record. Every customer account should find all of its invoices in one list, so their accounts team stops emailing you for copies. For anything sold away from the portal, you should be able to write a manual invoice that is paid, chased and recorded like any other. If you use Xero or QuickBooks, invoices and payments should go straight through so the two agree without anyone re-keying a figure.
9. Product information and support in the same place
Trade customers need more than prices. Specification sheets, safety data sheets, brochures and terms all need a home, and customers have questions.
Look for a document library where you upload once and use the file anywhere, with each document limited to the tiers that should see it. Scheduled announcements let you tell every customer about a price change or a new range, and pages that change with the account viewing them can show each customer its own documents and figures. Support tickets give customers one place to raise a problem, with every message kept on the ticket rather than in a shared inbox, and an FAQ section answers the common questions before they are asked.
10. Reporting and connections to your other systems
Finally, the portal should tell you how trade is going and fit in with what you already run. Look for a dashboard that reports revenue and activity over time, filtered how you like, with any of it exported as a file. Zapier, webhooks and a documented API let the portal pass information to the rest of your stack, and you should be able to export all of your data, in full, whenever you like.
How to compare B2B ordering portals
Score your current process against the ten stages above, and mark the ones that rely on someone re-keying or chasing. For most wholesalers, pricing per customer group and invoicing are the stages that take the most time.
As FormaPortal, we suggest testing any portal with one real customer: open a trade account for a company with two buyers, put it on a trade tier, place an order that qualifies for free delivery with a category discount, and see what the invoice looks like and where it goes. If you also work with resellers or agents who need documents and training as well as ordering, check that the same system can run a partner portal for them.
A few questions sort suppliers quickly:
- Can one trade account cover a whole customer company, with its own buyers and its own payment method?
- Can each customer tier see its own prices, and can some tiers stay invisible to the public?
- Can delivery rates and discount codes be set per customer tier or product category?
- Do orders raise their own invoices with tax per line, and do they sync to your accounting package?
- Does every plan include the full feature set, and are payment charges quoted before or after card processing fees?
B2B ordering portal: where to start
A B2B ordering portal should let trade customers do the routine work themselves: see their prices, place the order, follow its progress and download the invoice. Your team keeps the work that needs a person, such as quotes, key accounts and new business.
Start with the stage that costs your team the most hours. For most wholesalers that is re-keying orders and sending invoice copies. The FormaPortal team recommends moving your most regular trade customers onto the portal first, because their repeat orders show the time saved fastest, and their feedback shapes the catalogue before you invite everyone else.