What is a customer portal?
A customer portal is a secure, logged-in area where a business’s customers see their own information and act on it — order history, live order status, invoices, statements, contract pricing, documents and reordering. It reads from the systems that already hold that data, so the portal answers routine enquiries without anyone in the business being involved.
- Each customer sees only their own accounts, prices and documents.
- Data is read live from your ERP or accounts system, not copied.
- Measured on call and email volume, not on page views.
Why it matters
Your service team is a lookup service.
Count the enquiries that come in during a week and sort them. In a typical distribution or manufacturing business, the large majority are one of five questions: where is my order, can you resend that invoice, what is my price on this, can I have a copy of the certificate, and can you add two more to the order I placed yesterday.
Every one of those has a definitive answer sitting in a system you already own. A skilled person is being paid to read it aloud. That is the entire business case, and it is usually a strong one — not because you will reduce headcount, but because the same team can handle growth without adding to it.
Count these for one week
What a portal removes
Before we design anything we ask you to tally inbound enquiries by type. The result decides what gets built first, and it is almost never what the sales team predicted:
- Customers phone to ask where an order is, several times a day.
- Invoice and statement copies are emailed out by hand on request.
- Certificates, datasheets and COSHH documents are resent constantly.
- Repeat orders arrive by email and are keyed in by your team.
- A customer cannot confirm their own contract price without asking.
- Nothing is visible to the customer outside your office hours.
Scope
What a customer portal includes.
Built in the order your enquiry tally dictates. There is no point launching with document access if 60% of your calls are order tracking.
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Accounts, sites & permissions
Multiple users per customer with different rights — a buyer, a finance contact, a site manager — and a self-service invite flow so you are not creating logins.
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Live order & delivery status
Real status read from your ERP or WMS, with carrier tracking pulled in, so the answer the portal gives is the same answer your team would give.
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Invoices, statements & account
Self-service copy invoices, statements, credit position and payment where you want it. Consistently the fastest win for the finance team.
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Contract pricing & reordering
Each customer’s own agreed prices, previous orders and favourites, so a repeat order takes a minute and arrives structured rather than as free text in an email.
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Documents & compliance
Certificates, test reports, datasheets, delivery notes and signed PODs, attached to the order or batch they belong to and downloadable without asking.
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Integration with your systems
Reads from the ERP, accounts package and WMS that already own this data. The portal holds no second copy, so it can never be out of date.
Deliverables
What a portal is worth.
We ask for the enquiry tally before and after, because it is the only honest measure and because it is usually more dramatic than anyone expects.
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Routine enquiries stop arriving
The five questions that filled the inbox get answered by the portal. The team moves from reading data out to handling the exceptions that genuinely need a person.
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Customers can work at 10pm
Buyers do not keep your hours. Giving them order status, documents and reordering out of hours removes delay from their process, which is a genuine commercial advantage.
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Orders arrive clean
A structured reorder cannot have an ambiguous product code or a missing quantity. Order-entry errors and the credits they cause fall measurably.
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A reason to stay
Once a customer’s purchasing process runs through your portal, moving to a competitor means changing how they work. That is retention you do not have to discount for.
Is this the right answer?
When customer portals is worth doing — and when it is not.
We would rather lose a project at this stage than six weeks in. If the right-hand column describes you, say so and we will tell you what we would do instead.
Worth doing when
- The same five questions make up most of your inbound enquiries.
- Customers cannot see their own order status, invoices or documents.
- Repeat orders arrive as free text in an email and get retyped.
- Buyers work outside your office hours and have to wait.
Probably not when
- Your ERP data is not yet reliable enough to show a customer.
- You have fewer than a few dozen customers and know them all personally.
- Nobody will drive adoption, so customers will keep emailing anyway.
- You want it to look like a shop. Trade buyers do not want a shop.
How we deliver
Built in the order your call log dictates.
The highest-volume enquiry type goes first, always, so the portal starts paying for itself before it is finished.
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Phase one
Tally & design
Classify a week of inbound enquiries, confirm which systems hold the answers, and design the portal around the top two or three. Output is a scope and a fixed price.
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Phase two
Access & the top enquiry
Accounts, permissions and the single biggest enquiry type solved properly. Launched to a handful of friendly customers rather than everyone.
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Phase three
Broaden the self-service
Documents, invoices, reordering and whatever the tally ranked next, added one at a time with each one measured against the call log.
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Phase four
Roll out & drive adoption
Invite the base in waves, with the nudge that matters: your team answering routine emails with a link to the portal rather than with the answer.
What you receive
The things that actually land.
Artefacts, not adjectives. Everything below is listed in the scope document before a phase starts, so “done” is a defined state rather than an opinion.
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A classified enquiry tally
One week of calls and emails sorted by type, with an hours cost against each. The business case and the build order, in one document.
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The portal, integrated
Reading order, invoice, pricing and document data live from the systems that own it, never holding a second copy.
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A role and permission matrix
Which user at which customer can see and do what, enforced server-side and documented. In B2B, showing one customer another’s pricing is an incident.
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Self-service onboarding
An invite flow that does not require your team to create logins, with no password for the customer to invent.
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A document library
Certificates, test reports and PODs attached to the order or batch they belong to and downloadable without asking anyone.
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Before and after enquiry figures
The same tally repeated after launch. The only honest measure of whether it worked.
Golden Triangle
Why portals land well in this corridor.
The Golden Triangle is overwhelmingly B2B and overwhelmingly distribution-led, which is the ideal profile for self-service.
- B2B buying patterns Repeat, not browse Trade customers reorder the same lines constantly. That is the easiest purchasing behaviour to move into self-service, and the one consumer e-commerce thinking handles worst.
- Delivery questions Where is my pallet With this much freight moving through the M1 and M6 corridor, delivery status is the single highest-volume enquiry for most distributors here. It is also the easiest to automate well.
- Compliance paperwork Certificates on demand Manufacturing and food supply chains in the region demand batch certificates, test reports and specifications constantly. Attaching them to the order ends that traffic entirely.
We build portals for distributors, manufacturers and wholesalers serving national customer bases from Birmingham, Leicester, Northampton, Nottingham, Derby and Coventry.
Technology
Portal technology.
The portal is a thin, fast layer over systems that already exist. Keeping it thin is the design principle that matters most.
- TypeScript
- Laravel
- PostgreSQL
- ERP & accounts APIs
- Carrier tracking APIs
- SSO & MFA
- Online payments
- Caching layer
- Azure / AWS
- Usage analytics
Where we deliver this
Customer Portals across the Golden Triangle.
35 locations, each with a page written for it — the sectors it is actually built on, and what that means for this work. See all areas we serve.
Northamptonshire 10
Warwickshire 5
West Midlands 5
Buckinghamshire 4
Leicestershire 4
Staffordshire 4
Derbyshire 1
Greater London 1
Nottinghamshire 1
Questions
Customer portals, answered plainly.
Mostly asked by operations and finance, who feel the call volume first.
What should a B2B customer portal include?
Start with whatever your inbound enquiries are actually about. For most Midlands distributors and manufacturers that means live order and delivery status first, then copy invoices and statements, then contract pricing and reordering, then compliance documents. Building in that order means the portal reduces workload from its first release rather than its last.
Will our customers actually use a portal?
They will if it is faster than emailing you, and they will not if it is not. The things that drive adoption are a one-click invite with no password to invent, mobile that genuinely works, and your own team replying to routine requests with a portal link instead of the answer. Adoption is a rollout discipline, not a feature.
Can the portal show live data from our ERP?
Yes, and it should read live rather than hold a copy. We integrate with Sage, Xero, Business Central, NetSuite, SAP, Epicor and bespoke ERPs through their APIs, or through a middleware layer where the API is limited. A portal that shows yesterday’s stock figure generates more calls than it prevents.
How much does a customer portal cost?
A focused first release solving one or two high-volume enquiry types is typically a mid five-figure build, with later phases priced separately. Because the business case is measured in enquiry volume, we ask for a week’s call tally during discovery so the payback is calculated from your numbers rather than from an industry average.
How do we keep each customer’s data separate?
Access control is enforced on the server for every request, scoped to the customer account and, where relevant, to individual sites or cost centres within it. We document the role matrix and have it reviewed, because in a B2B portal showing one customer another’s pricing is a commercial incident, not just a bug.
Can customers place orders through it?
Yes. Reordering from history with contract pricing is usually the highest-value step, and it benefits you twice: the order arrives structured so it cannot be mis-keyed, and it lands in your system directly rather than being retyped from an email.
How do we get customers to start using it?
Adoption is a rollout discipline rather than a feature. What works: a one-click invite with no password to invent, mobile that genuinely works, and your own team answering routine emails with a portal link instead of the answer. Inviting the base in waves rather than all at once lets you fix the friction the first group finds.
Can customers place orders as well as view them?
Yes, and reordering from history at contract prices is usually the highest-value step. It benefits you twice: the order arrives structured so it cannot be mis-keyed, and it lands in your system directly rather than being retyped from an email by someone in customer service.
What if our ERP data is messy?
Then we fix that first, or we limit what the portal shows until it is fixed. Publishing unreliable data to customers is worse than publishing nothing, because it generates more calls than it prevents and costs you credibility. We would rather launch with three things that are right than ten that are approximately right.
Can different people at the same customer have different access?
Yes, and for anything beyond a small account it is essential. A buyer, a finance contact and a site manager need different things and should not all see each other’s. Multi-user accounts with per-user roles, and scoping by site or cost centre where the customer is a group, are part of the standard build.
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Next step
Tally a week of enquiries first.
Sort one week of calls and emails by type and the portal almost designs itself. We will help you classify them and show you what each one costs to keep answering by hand.