B2B ecommerce portal: how to build an ordering site your trade customers actually use

Does this sound familiar? It is Monday morning and the inbox holds 40 orders from trade customers. Some are typed into the email body, some are a PDF order form, and one is a photo of a handwritten list from a carpenter on a building site. One person spends the morning keying them into e-conomic, looking up each customer’s discount in a spreadsheet and calling back about items that are out of stock. That is exactly the situation a B2B ecommerce portal solves. Customers order themselves, see their own prices and stock status, and the order lands in your bookkeeping without a single typo.

What is a B2B ecommerce portal and how does it differ from a normal webshop?

A normal webshop is built to persuade a stranger to buy once. A B2B portal is built to make it easy for a known customer to buy again and again. That changes almost everything: the customer is logged in, the prices come from an agreement, payment is on invoice with 14 or 30 days’ credit, and an order often has 40 lines instead of two. The buyer at your customer wants to be done quickly, so search by item number, quick order and reorder matter more than large product photos.

That difference means B2B often looks more like a customer portal than a shop. If you also want customers to access invoices, delivery status, documentation and service agreements, it is in practice a customer portal with ordering built in, and it pays to think of it that way from the start.

Which features does a B2B ecommerce portal need?

The list below is the one we use ourselves when we scope a B2B solution. Tick what you need on day one and move the rest to a later phase. It is the fastest route to a realistic budget, and you can paste the list straight into an email to the supplier you are talking to.

• Login per customer company with several users and roles (buyer, approver, bookkeeper).
• Customer-specific prices, discount groups, volume tiers and net prices.
• Agreed ranges, so each customer only sees the products relevant to them.
• Quick order by item number and upload of an order list from Excel.
• Reorder from order history and saved shopping lists.
• Invoice payment with a credit limit, and card payment for new customers if needed.
• Stock status and delivery time pulled from the ERP or warehouse system.
• Approval flow, if orders above an amount must be approved at the customer.
• Shipping via PostNord, GLS or your own delivery with the right freight rules.
• Orders, customers and invoices synced with e-conomic, Dinero or your ERP.
• Sales rep access, so your reps can order on behalf of the customer.
• A public catalogue for SEO, with prices behind the login.

Customer prices: the heart of every B2B portal

Pricing logic is what gets underestimated most often. A typical wholesaler has a list price, a few discount groups, special prices on selected items for the biggest customers and perhaps a volume tier. If that logic already lives in your ERP or in e-conomic, the webshop should fetch it from there and never maintain a copy. If it lives in a spreadsheet, the project is a good opportunity to move it into one system. The most important question for a supplier is therefore: where do the prices live, and who updates them?

Reorders and quick order

In B2B most customers buy the same items again. A button that puts last month’s order in the basket, or a saved list of "regular items for the workshop", saves the buyer many minutes every time. It is also the feature that makes customers use the portal instead of sending an email. When we look at how B2B solutions are used, reorder and search by item number are typically the most used features.

How do you connect a B2B portal to e-conomic or your ERP?

The integration is what separates a B2B portal that saves time from one that creates double work. The basic rule is that each type of data has one place where it is true, and the other systems read from there. If the term is new to you, read our explanation of what an API is. The table shows the typical division of labour we use as a starting point.

If you use e-conomic or Dinero, there are already solid APIs to build on, and we have pre-built integrations for both that we reuse. See what can be synced under integration with e-conomic. If you run a larger ERP system, we start by mapping which data it can deliver and how fast. Some older systems can only export files overnight, and then stock levels have to be shown with a caveat.

How much does a B2B ecommerce portal cost in 2026?

Remember to count recurring subscriptions when you compare. A standard platform can look cheap at launch, but the B2B plugin, the ERP connector and the payment module each cost a monthly fee, and they often grow with your order volume. We walk through that calculation in how much a webshop costs. With us, a scoped portal can start in our web packages, for example Large at DKK 54,000 plus DKK 1,200 a month with 36 features and 3 integrations, and larger solutions get a fixed price after a short clarification.

Standard platform or your own system: which fits your B2B trade?

We are an interested party, because we build custom systems, and we happily recommend a standard platform when it fits. The honest rule of thumb is that the more your business differs on price and process, the more you pay to force it into a standard. See the full comparison in Shopify vs WooCommerce vs custom.

Worked example: a wholesaler with 120 trade customers

Picture a plumbing parts wholesaler with 120 active trade customers, around 600 orders a month and e-conomic for accounting. Today orders arrive by email and phone, and each takes on average 8 minutes to key, check and confirm. That is 80 hours a month. If half the customers move to the portal within six months, and a web order takes 1 minute to check, it frees around 35 hours a month. At an internal hourly cost of DKK 400 that is roughly DKK 14,000 a month, or about DKK 170,000 a year, before you count fewer corrections and faster invoicing.

Even with a portal at the high end of the market range, the payback period in that example is typically under a year. The figures are an illustration, and yours will differ, but the method is the same: count orders, measure minutes per order and be realistic about how many customers switch. We use the same method in the guide to digitising manual processes.

Which red flags should you watch for?

• Prices have to be maintained in two places: the ERP and the webshop.
• The integration is a nightly CSV file that nobody monitors.
• The supplier cannot explain what happens if e-conomic is down when a customer orders.
• Every new customer group needs a new plugin or a new subscription.
• You do not own the code or the data, and there is no exit plan.
• The quote says "integration" without describing which data flows which way.
• No testing with real customer agreements and real orders before launch.

The last point matters most. Build a test list of 10 real customers, their agreements and a typical order for each, and require the supplier to show that prices and bookkeeping match before you open to customers. Several of the other points can be caught early with our list of red flags in a software quote.

How to get started with a B2B ecommerce portal

If you want a concrete figure for your own B2B solution, describe your customers, range and systems and get a fixed price within 24 hours. You can also see our packages under pricing. We build everything from scratch, you own the code and the data, and you follow the project in our client panel along the way.