B2B Ecommerce Portal Development

Why B2B buyers outgrow phone, email and PDF order forms

In most distribution businesses, orders still arrive as emails with spreadsheets attached, faxed PDF forms, voicemails and texts to a rep’s cell phone. Inside sales staff retype each one into the ERP, check stock, confirm the contract rate, and email back an acknowledgment. Errors show up as wrong units of measure, missed substitutions and shipments to an old address. Buyers, meanwhile, have no way to check order status or download a packing slip after hours.

A B2B portal is not a consumer store with a login. Your customers are companies with several buyers, several ship to locations, purchase order rules and agreed terms. The products they see, the rates they get and the way they pay all depend on who they are. Tepia designs the portal around those account rules first, and then makes ordering as fast as the best consumer experiences your buyers use at home.

Buyer tasks the portal has to handle

Tepia scopes a B2B portal from the tasks your buyers perform every week, then traces each one back to the ERP data it depends on:

Tepia also builds the sales rep view, so a rep can place an order on behalf of a customer from a tablet during a visit and the customer sees it in their own history.

Account structures, approvals and terms

The account model is where B2B portals succeed or fail. Tepia models a parent company with child accounts for each location, each with its own ship to addresses, catalogs and buyers. A regional restaurant group, for example, might let each kitchen manager order from an approved list up to a weekly limit, with anything above that routed to the purchasing director.

• Roles: requester, approver, account administrator and view only roles that your customer’s admin can manage without calling you.
• Spending rules: limits per order, per period or per category, with approvals by email or in the app.
• Purchase orders: PO numbers required or optional per account, with validation against blanket PO balances where you track them.
• Terms and credit: net terms and credit limits read from the ERP, with orders over limit held for your credit team.
• Contract catalogs: restricted product lists, private label items and customer part numbers shown alongside yours.

Tepia keeps these rules in the portal only when the ERP cannot hold them, so your team never maintains the same account setting in two places.

ERP, punchout and sales integrations

Integration is most of the work in a B2B portal, and Tepia plans it before design. The ERP is usually NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, SAP Business One, Epicor, Infor or Sage, sometimes an older system reached through a database or file exchange. Tepia decides with you which data syncs in real time, such as stock and order submission, and which syncs on a schedule, such as catalog changes and statements.

• Punchout: cXML punchout so buyers at large customers can shop your catalog from inside Coupa, SAP Ariba or Jaggaer and return a cart to their own procurement system.
• EDI: continued EDI for customers who already send orders that way, with portal orders landing in the same ERP queue.
• Tax: Avalara or a similar provider for sales tax and exemption certificate management.
• Payments: Stripe for card and ACH payments on open balances, tokenized so card data never touches your servers.
• CRM: Salesforce or HubSpot so reps see portal activity, abandoned carts and reorder gaps for their accounts.

See our ERP integration services and NetSuite integration pages for how Tepia handles sync rules and error recovery.

How Tepia approaches B2B ecommerce portal development

Tepia follows its six phase process, with extra weight on data mapping because ERP data drives every screen. A US based project manager coordinates your sales, customer service, IT and finance teams.

1. Discovery: interviews with inside sales, reps, credit staff and a sample of customer buyers, plus an ERP data audit covering items, accounts, rates and terms. Deliverables are an Investigation Summary, an Interview Summary and User Stories such as a buyer uploading a fifty line CSV and fixing two invalid part numbers.
2. Design: a design questionnaire, moodboards, a style guide and wireframes for quick order, the approval inbox, account administration and the statements view.
3. Development and Testing: an Alpha against a copy of your ERP, then a Beta with a group of friendly customers. Test plans cover rate accuracy against ERP output line by line, sync failure recovery and permission boundaries between accounts.
4. Training: hands on sessions for your inside sales and customer service staff, plus onboarding guides your reps can walk customers through.
5. Launch: account invitations in waves, migration of saved order guides, a transition plan for customers who still email orders, and support reps on the first month end.
6. Support: issue resolution, bug tracking and feature requests such as punchout for a new enterprise customer.

Typically Discovery takes 1 to 3 months, development and QA 2 to 6 months, and launch about a month. See our process.

Platform B2B features or a custom portal

Shopify Plus, BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce all offer B2B features such as company accounts, customer specific catalogs and net terms. If your account rules fit those features and your ERP has a solid connector for the platform, extending the platform is often the faster path, and Tepia will recommend it.

A custom portal earns its place when your rules outgrow the platform: deep account hierarchies, complex contract rate structures from the ERP, punchout for enterprise buyers, rep ordering on behalf of customers, or an older ERP that needs a custom integration layer anyway. It is also the right fit when you want a native reorder app for buyers on job sites or in kitchens. Read how to build a B2B ordering app, see wholesale ordering app development, and talk to Tepia about your customers.

Frequently asked questions