Building a dealer portal: what belongs in it and what does not
Dealers want their own prices, to order without calling and to know what is in stock. What a dealer portal needs to do, and where it gets complicated.
If you sell through dealers or resellers, you know the pattern. They email for a price, call to ask whether something is in stock, and ask for the latest product photos for the third time this year. Each of those questions is small. Together they are a job. A dealer portal moves that traffic to one place where your dealer looks things up and orders on their own.
It is a specific kind of B2B portal: your customer is itself a business, with several people working on its behalf, and with terms that differ per dealer. That last part is where most off-the-shelf solutions fall short.
What a dealer wants to be able to do
- See their own prices, not the list price and not another dealer's. Including volume tiers and terms that apply only to them.
- Order without picking up the phone, outside office hours too, with a confirmation they can find again.
- See what is in stock and when something is due back in, so they can make a promise to their own customer.
- Download marketing material: product photos, spec sheets, manuals, the current price list.
- Find their order history and invoices without emailing your sales desk.
Several users per company
This is the part that gets underestimated most often. A dealer is not a person but a company. The buyer may place orders, the technician only wants to check stock, the owner wants the invoices. That means your portal has to know which company someone belongs to and what they are allowed to do there. Add that later and you end up rewriting a large part of what is already built. So I include it from the start, even if you begin with a single user per dealer.
One practical requirement follows from this: let the dealer add and remove colleagues themselves. Otherwise you become the help desk for every new hire and every departure, and an account stays active for someone who has long since moved to a competitor.
Where it gets complicated
Not in the screens. The screens of a dealer portal are fairly predictable. The work is in the data behind them. Pricing agreements often live partly in your ERP, partly in a spreadsheet and partly in your account manager's head. Stock sits in a system that was never meant to be queried by outsiders. Before there can be a portal, it has to be clear which system is the truth for prices, stock and customer data.
That is why the integration with your existing systems is usually the largest part of the project. The portal shows what is in your ERP or accounting software and writes orders back there. Keeping things up to date in two places is exactly what you wanted to avoid.
A dealer portal is only as good as the pricing agreements behind it. If those are messy, your dealer is the first to notice.
What I leave out of the first version
A built-in chat, a news feed, extensive reporting for the dealer. All possible, but rarely why dealers call you. I start with prices, ordering and stock, because that is where the questions come from. Once that is in use, marketing material is the logical next step. Whether a portal pays off for you is a calculation, worked out in when a client portal pays for itself.
Dealer portal or B2B webshop?
If your dealers mostly order from a fixed range and there is little variation in the terms, a B2B webshop with customer-specific prices may be enough. As soon as there is more to it than ordering, such as documents, several roles per company or the status of open orders, a portal is the better fit.
How I build a portal is on client portal development. What it costs and what drives the price is on the cost of a client portal.