How B2B Customer Portals Boost Conversions and Drive Customer Loyalty

Discover how B2B customer portals drive sales growth with self-service experiences that meet modern buyer expectations and free your team to focus on growth.

Today’s buyers have made it loud and clear that they don’t want to place manual B2B orders any more. According to Gartner, 83% of B2B buyers prefer to self-serve their own orders online. B2B vendors that don’t modernize fast will lose their customers to competitors.

While it may seem like a simple solution, offering a B2B customer portal can go a long way toward improving the buying experience. With it, you are providing your customers a dedicated space to quickly place bulk orders, manage and track past orders, and much more. 

A robust customer portal not only gives customers access to the sales channels they want, it also frees up your customer service and sales teams to spend more time building relationships and growing your business. 

The advantages of B2B customer portals

B2B buyers expect ordering on behalf of a business to be just as convenient as shopping online in their personal lives. In the same Gartner survey, 65% of B2B buyers who self-navigated the purchase process reported completing a high-quality deal. That’s why it’s critical to do more than just offer basic online ordering. You need a robust portal that makes the entire buying experience a breeze. 

Offering comprehensive self-service benefits both you and your customers: 

• Customers can place orders and reorders quickly.
• Customers can manage their account information independently.
• Customers can place orders from any device, anywhere in the world, at a time that’s convenient.
• Order accuracy improves by removing manual data entry. 
• Customers are more likely to be retained with access to the sales channels they desire.
• Sales and customer service teams can save valuable time, and focus their efforts on growth instead of rekeying in orders, sending PDF invoices, or updating customer information.

To help B2B businesses modernize, platforms like Shopify provide feature-rich customer portals that can be customized and personalized. Businesses can build and launch a robust, streamlined online ordering system built from a unified back end. 

How Angelus Brand modernized their B2B buying process with a customer portal

Angelus Brand has been around since 1907, and today they are a leading retailer of shoe customization and care products. Despite their excellent products and deep industry expertise, they had to modernize to meet the evolving demands of their B2B customers As part of their migration to Shopify, they were able to streamline and optimize their wholesale purchasing experience with B2B on Shopify, a suite of prebuilt features that includes an optimized customer portal.

“Order entry used to be this manual process of people writing things down on a scratch pad or writing out orders that came through fax or email, and there were constant errors. Now we channel wholesale partners to our B2B portal on Shopify, so there's no discussion or intermediate area where someone might make a mistake,” said Tyler Angelos, CEO of Angelus Brand.

The digital demands of the modern B2B buyer 

In today’s competitive B2B landscape, simply being online isn’t enough. Buyers now expect a seamless, personalized experience that caters to their specific pricing, product, and account needs. With 71% of B2B buyers categorized as younger buyers (millennials and Gen Z), businesses must adapt to their digital-first expectations and provide an intuitive, easy-to-navigate buying process.

As B2B transactions continue to rise—over 50% of buyers place orders daily and 32% make multiple purchases per day—any friction in the digital experience becomes a major barrier. To meet the demands of these tech-savvy buyers, businesses must ensure their platforms are streamlined, efficient, and tailored to offer a frictionless purchasing process that mirrors the digital interactions they encounter daily.

Many B2B organizations have at least a basic online ordering system. But if they are clunky and difficult to use, customers will avoid them or take their business elsewhere. According to survey data from Sana Commerce, 86% of B2B buyers are willing to switch suppliers if another B2B web store offers a better experience.

Key features of a successful B2B customer portal

By now we’ve established the critical need to deliver an optimized, seamless buying experience for B2B buyers. If and when you are ready to upgrade your B2B portal, here are the key features you should look out for.

Robust self-service capabilities

We’ll start with the most fundamental capability: enabling self-service so buyers can instantly place orders from any device at any time. At a minimum, your portal should offer real-time visibility into inventory levels, order status, and delivery tracking. You should also offer advanced account management features that allow customers to access their complete order history, duplicate past purchases, and retrieve and pay invoices on demand. Because today’s buyers manage procurement across multiple devices, each of these capabilities should be fully optimized for each device size, from phone to tablet.

In many B2B businesses, each customer relationship has unique characteristics. To maximize value from every customer, your B2B ecommerce portal should deliver tailored experiences, including custom pricing structures, personalized product catalogs, and targeted content. For wholesale B2B customers, make sure your portal offers a tailored experience for seamless bulk ordering. You can also integrate real-time communication tools, such as live chat support, to provide immediate assistance—or even real-time promotions—at any point in the buying process. 

Streamlined ordering 

Manual B2B orders via email and phone are slow and error-prone, leading directly to lost revenue. Giving your buyers a streamlined, optimized ordering experience will eliminate costly mistakes and save everyone a lot of time. 

To drive both customer satisfaction and efficiency, start by making sure your most common order types can be placed quickly. You also make it easy for customers to place different types of B2B orders, including:

• General bulk orders with numerous SKUs and pricing complexity
• Custom quotes
• Upload orders via CSV files
• Reorders from order history

Direct integration to external systems

A fully self-service, modern buying process can only be enabled with seamless integrations. Your portal should be able to integrate with ERP, CRM, PIM, and other key business systems without the need for custom development work. These integrations provide the data for key features and functionality, including: 

• ERP integrations to offer real-time order tracking and invoicing
• CRM integrations to drive personalization efforts, with complete customer histories and preferences
• PIM integrations to provide real-time inventory visibility and automated product updates
• Integrations with shipping and logistics systems for accurate fulfillment and delivery timelines

Automated workflows

Ecommerce platforms now incorporate native workflow engines, such as Shopify Flow, as part of their B2B suite of tools. You can use these engines to create workflows to automatically route product data, purchase approvals, and order information to appropriate recipients, providing a streamlined purchasing process for your customers. You can also create workflows to:

• Automate the sending of order confirmations and invoices to multiple email addresses
• Automate new customer account setup 
• Automate invitations to new customers to start placing orders
• Automatically alert sales reps when their customers place orders

Building a B2B customer portal with Shopify

When you build on Shopify, you get access to a comprehensive set of prebuilt B2B functionality and features. You can quickly build and launch customer portals with all of the key features modern buyers expect, with added support for advanced customization and personalization. 

Our customer portal includes comprehensive account and order management functionality. In addition, the platform supports a range of B2B business needs that include:

• Native B2B themes optimized for wholesale purchasing experiences
• Advanced theme customization with Shopify’s templating language Liquid
• Headless commerce support for creating unique, decoupled storefronts
• Comprehensive API access for custom integrations and functionality
• Seamless, out-of-the-box integrations with essential business systems (ERP, OMS, CRM)
• An extensive app ecosystem featuring over 10,000 verified applications

Our B2B ecosystem also offers specialized applications for B2B businesses that allow you to quickly introduce new features in your store. Here are just a few of the thousands available:

• O: Request a Quote | Hide Price allows your customers to quickly and easily request a quote for large orders. It also lets you hide prices and “add to cart” buttons to instead prompt customers to call for pricing or fill out a customizable form to request a quote.
• Sufio automatically creates professional invoices, credit notes, and other documents, as well as builds custom invoicing workflows. All invoices offered by this app are validated by certified accountants, ensuring documents meet regulations for B2B sales. 
• Upro allows B2B buyers to place their orders by uploading a CSV file of products, SKUs, and quantities.
• On the Business Portal allows your buyers to switch the company location they are purchasing on behalf of within customer accounts. They can create a cart directly from customer accounts without navigating away to the storefront.

Browse more B2B third-party apps with the customer account extensions app guide.

How Dermalogica enables effortless B2B purchasing with Shopify

Before migrating to Shopify, skincare retailer Dermalogica ran their B2B business on an outdated platform with a clunky interface and poor search functionality. Their customers got so fed up they chose to call in their orders instead.

“We did a lot of research into B2B platforms. Do they meet what our current accounts are accustomed to? Does it get rid of the pain points of our current platform? And is it expandable for the future? And out of the gate, Shopify’s B2B solution gave us confidence that it was the best choice out there,” said Nicholas Lachhman, Dermalogica’s associate ecommerce manager.

Using Shopify, Dermalogica created a buying experience for their B2B customers that was more effortless and familiar. Because Shopify unified their back end, customers could place B2B orders the same way they would for their personal shopping. The results were significant: a 3x increase in reorder frequency, a 23% increase in conversion rate, and 75% of customers rating the buyer experience as a 4 out of 5 or higher.

Benefits of choosing Shopify for your B2B customer portal

While Shopify has a long history of supporting DTC businesses, our platform and ecosystem have evolved to support large-scale B2B operations as well. With an R&D investment exceeding $1 billion annually, we’re continually innovating to meet the rapidly changing demands of the B2B market. When you build on Shopify, you partner with a Leader in the 2024 Forrester Wave™: Commerce Solutions for B2B, and a Leader in the enterprise market for the second consecutive year in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce.

When you choose Shopify to power your self-service ecommerce operations, your business gains many competitive advantages, including:

• Improved operational efficiency: By automating processes and manual tasks related to order fulfillment, sales teams can focus instead on growing new business.
• A fully modern customer experience: Your buyers can easily place and manage orders with a self-service customer portal that reduces order errors, provides transparency on their order status, lets them make account updates on their own, and much more.
• Lower costs: You can move more of your business online onto a central platform, including manual and sales rep orders, custom quotes, customer data, and analytics. This can be achieved without developer knowledge, so you can launch quickly at a fraction of the cost of other platforms.
• Rapid scalability: With Shopify, you can quickly respond to rapid expansions of business without frustrating customers or introducing order delays. Businesses can add functionality to reach new markets and channels without adding technical debt or costly development fees.
• Agility and flexibility: If your business needs to adjust the buying experience to meet specific customer needs, you can quickly add new customizations to your customer portal using your choice of out-of-the-box features, apps, code, or APIs. 
• A partner ready for the future: Shopify is committed to constantly innovating and improving our platform for all of our customers, including large B2B businesses.

Stay competitive in B2B sales with a customer portal on Shopify

As the expectations of modern B2B buyers rapidly evolve, businesses must deliver robust self-service or risk losing their customers to a competitor who does. Today’s businesses cannot afford to keep an outdated, friction-filled ordering process. But with a provider like Shopify, modernization is easier than ever before, and investments in a robust B2B customer portal have a very high ROI. 

If you're ready to improve your buying experience, Shopify’s B2B suite is a strategic choice for rapidly launching powerful customer portals. By choosing Shopify, you get more than an ecommerce platform—you get a future-ready business partner who is fully invested in providing the tools and resources you need to navigate the increasing demands of B2B commerce.

FAQ on B2B customer portals

What is a B2B ecommerce customer portal?

A B2B ecommerce customer portal allows buyers to browse products, place orders, track shipments, manage invoices, update their information, and receive personalized pricing and discounts online.

What features should a B2B customer portal have?

A B2B customer portal should include essential self-service features like:

• Account management
• Order tracking
• Personalized pricing
• Bulk ordering
• Real-time inventory
• Multiple payment options

It should seamlessly integrate with ERP, CRM, and other business systems. Additional features like advanced search, custom catalogs, CSV uploads, and quote request forms can further enhance the customer experience.

How does a B2B ecommerce portal improve customer experience?

A B2B ecommerce portal enhances customer experience by offering a seamless, self-service platform where buyers can easily:

• Place orders
• Track shipments
• Access custom pricing
• Manage accounts anytime, anywhere

It simplifies the buying process with bulk ordering, CSV uploads, one-click reordering, and real-time updates. Integration with core systems ensures accurate inventory and order histories, providing buyers with a smoother, more efficient experience that drives loyalty and conversions.

What are the benefits of integrating a B2B portal with an ERP system?

A B2B customer portal integrated with an ERP system offers several key benefits:

• Automated order processing
• Real-time inventory management
• Accurate pricing and order status updates
• Centralized data management for customer insights
• Automated workflows to save time and enhance efficiency

By integrating with an ERP system, businesses can streamline operations, reduce manual errors, and improve customer satisfaction.