B2B Platforms

Business-to-business selling is not retail. There are customer-specific price lists, payment terms, credit limits, minimum order quantities, discount tiers and approval chains. An "order form" that does not carry these rules does not make a dealer's job easier — it sends them back to ordering by phone.

When building a B2B platform, the hard part is not the interface but modelling the rules correctly.

Scope

• Dealer / account portal — each customer seeing their own pricing, balance, open orders and history
• Pricing logic — prices and discount rules varying by customer group, product, quantity and period
• Order flow — cart, approval steps, partial shipment, order status tracking
• Account visibility — balance, terms, credit limit checks and behavior when a limit is exceeded
• ERP / accounting integration — two-way flow of inventory, account and invoice data
• Permission structure — separating who places an order from who approves it within the same dealer

Integration is the heart of it

In B2B projects the storefront usually ships in a few weeks; what determines the timeline is the connections behind it. How often, and in which direction, will inventory and account data flow? When does an order land in the ERP? Which system is the source of truth for the price list?

A platform built before these questions are settled looks like it works but is not trustworthy. One-way, delayed synchronization is the most common failure in B2B: the dealer orders a product shown in stock, the product is not there, and trust breaks once.

So we start by examining the data on the ERP side: which field is reliable, which is entered by hand, which record is inconsistent. No architecture gets built before that is visible.

Actually making the dealer's job easier

The measure of success for a B2B portal is not visitor count but the drop in orders arriving by phone. What achieves that is usually simple:

• One-click reordering from a past order
• A frequently ordered products list
• Bulk order upload via Excel
• Fast search by product code (dealers know the code, not the name)
• An order flow that works on mobile — field teams are not at a desk

How we work

First we map the existing order process as it actually is: who asks for what, through which channel, and who approves it. That process is what gets digitalized — not the ideal one on paper.

Then we pilot with a few of the highest-volume dealers. The first feedback from the field is worth more than ten decisions made at the design table.

We wrote in more detail about why inventory consistency matters this much in our e-commerce article.