A B2B portal your customers do not log in to is a cost. The wholesaler has paid for the implementation, sales reps still take orders by phone and retype them into the accounting system, and the return on that investment sits at zero.
This article describes five ways the board and the sales team move ordering from the phone to the portal, compares three approaches to running that change and ends with a list of questions for a board meeting. All five are organisational decisions, and none of them needs a developer.
What a portal nobody uses costs
The share of orders customers place in the portal themselves, out of all orders, is the one figure that says whether the implementation is paying back. A portal that handles one order in ten delivers a tenth of what it was built for, and its running costs are paid in full.
Two sides block the change and both have a reason. For a sales rep, taking an order by phone is faster than walking a customer through logging in. The call takes a few minutes, the commission is the same whichever channel the order came through, and a customer talked into the portal may start ordering without the rep. For the customer the phone is comfortable too. They have known the rep for years, and a mistake in the order is the supplier's problem.
The cost of inaction has three parts. The first is double handling. The wholesaler maintains the portal and keeps paying for manual retyping, so the costs of the old process stay and the costs of the new one come on top. The second is incomplete data. An order taken by phone and entered straight into the accounting system leaves no trace in the portal. The customer's history there is empty, the repeat-order button has nothing to repeat, and a customer who logs in once and finds nothing will not log in again. The third part is the reps' time. The hours that were supposed to go on winning new accounts still go on retyping.
A simple test can be run this week. Take last month's orders and split them into those placed by the customer in the portal and those taken by a rep by phone or email. If the second group can only be counted by asking the reps, that is already the first result.
Three approaches to moving orders across
The comparison is qualitative. Figures from one implementation are in the case study below.
| Approach | What the customer gets | When the portal starts paying back | Work for the sales team | Risk on the sales side | What is left after a year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launch and a mailing with logins | A login, a password and a link | Unknown. Depends on how many customers come in on their own | None. Reps keep taking calls | Low for customers, high for the investment | A portal used by a handful of customers, the rest as before |
| Phone switched off on launch day | A notice that from day X orders go through the portal only | Quickly, if the customers stay | Reps take complaints instead of orders | High. A customer who will not log in to someone else's system has the competitor's number | A high self-service share among those who stayed |
| Guided change | The first order together with the rep, the phone keeps working | Gradually, at a pace measured every month | More work in the first months, less afterwards | Low. Nobody loses access to their supplier | The portal as the main channel, the phone for exceptions |
The first approach is the most common because it looks the cheapest. The self-service share then stops at the few customers who preferred ordering online anyway, and the rest call as before. The second approach gives a quick result in the report and a risk the board usually does not want to carry. The third is the subject of the rest of this article.
Guided change starts before launch day. The customer's account, price list, credit limit and order history have to be in the portal on the day the rep first invites them in. That is a separate stage of the project, described in the guide to implementing a B2B platform.
What an order looks like during the transition
The flow below assumes the phone keeps ringing. The difference is in what the rep does after picking up.
- The customer calls or emails an order, as always.
- The rep takes the order, but instead of retyping it into the accounting system, enters it in the portal on that customer's account. The individual price list and credit limit fill in on their own.
- The order goes from the portal to the accounting system the same way as an order the customer placed themselves. Nobody retypes anything twice.
- The customer receives an email confirmation immediately, with a link to the order in the portal. There they see their price list, their balance and their history.
- On the next call the rep has something concrete. The same order is waiting in the portal to be repeated with one click, so the rep suggests doing it together, on the phone.
- The board sees in the report who placed each order - the customer or the rep on their behalf. The self-service share is calculated from that one field, by customer and by rep.
Step two decides the rest. If every order, whatever the channel, lands in the portal, the customer's history is complete from day one and the repeat button has something to repeat.
Five ways to move customers to the portal
The five ways are in the order of implementation. The first concerns the portal itself, the next two the sales reps, the fourth the customers, the last the board. Skipping the first cancels out the others.
An order in the portal has to take less time than a call
A customer will change a habit if their usual order takes less time in the portal than on the phone. The portal wins when a repeat order takes one click, the list of items from the customer's spreadsheet comes in through a file import, and the price shown after logging in is their contract price. A portal with list prices and a note saying "ask your account manager for your discount" loses to the phone, because the customer has to call anyway.
The second condition is a catalogue in which the product can be found. A customer who cannot find the item they order every month picks up the phone, even though the cause is in the catalogue data. In the Trippi shop we brought four supplier price lists down to one category tree, 12,000 selected SKUs remained out of 22,000 items, and connecting a new supplier went from 2-3 weeks to 2-3 days. After launch, every missing product costs one phone call.
Before the sales team starts persuading anyone, one person should place the last ten orders of the most frequently calling customer in the portal and time each of them. If it comes out longer than a call, persuading customers will achieve nothing, and fixing the portal goes ahead of the rest of the list.
A rep's bonus that also counts orders the customer placed alone
A rep takes orders by phone because it is faster for them, and the bonus scheme does not see it. The commission is the same whether the order came by phone or through the portal, and the time spent explaining the portal to a customer is unpaid.
The change sits with the board and has two parts. The first is a target for the self-service share in each rep's portfolio, measured every month and shown in the same report as turnover. The second is removing the fear that the portal takes the customer away from the rep. Turnover from orders their customers placed on their own stays in their commission in full. That is when the rep has time for new accounts and for bigger conversations with existing ones.
In the portal for iBox the handling time per order fell by 80% after launch. The rep gets that time back when their customers order in the portal.
The first login together with the rep, on an account prepared in advance
What changes a habit is the first order placed alone that worked. So each customer's first login and first order should happen with the rep - on a visit to the customer or over the phone, with the screen open on both sides. The rep says where to click and waits, instead of clicking for the customer.
The condition is an account prepared before the conversation. After logging in, the customer should see their price list, their limit and balance, their order history from recent months, and their invoices. If the history is empty and the price list generic, the first impression is "this is not for me", and there will be no second conversation.
The order of customers is a decision too. First those who order most often and most repetitively, because for them the one-click repeat gives the most and the effect shows in the report after a month. The largest accounts with unusual orders can wait for the second round. One rep starts the change with a few customers in the first month, then moves on to the rest of the portfolio.
Things that get done only in the portal
Some of the calls from customers are not orders. A request for a duplicate invoice, a question about the balance, a question whether the order has shipped, a question about the price of a particular item. Each takes the rep a few minutes and each is handled by the portal without them. From launch day the sales team can answer with one sentence and a link - the invoice is on the account to download, the balance shows after logging in.
The credit limit and available funds visible after logging in are a separate subject, covered in the article on B2B trade credit. For moving orders into the portal, what counts is that a customer who wants to know how much more they can order has a reason to log in instead of calling.
The strongest argument is opening hours. The wholesaler's office works until 4 or 5 in the afternoon, and the customer puts an order together when they have time, often after closing their own shop. At iBox, since launch, customers order in the evenings and at weekends, because the portal needs no one on duty.
A monthly report and a date after which the phone is the exception
The board runs the change with one report. It shows the share of orders customers placed on their own, by rep and by customer, month on month. The customer who has not logged in once in three months and the rep whose portfolio share has not moved both have a name in that report.
The report needs a date from which the phone is the channel for exceptions. An exception is an unusual order, a new customer or a portal outage. From that day an ordinary repeat order goes through the portal, and if the rep takes it by phone, they enter it on the customer's account, as in the flow above. The date is announced to customers several months ahead and is not moved.
A customer who still does not want to log in after that date gets a conversation instead of a block. The reasons are usually specific. A product missing from the catalogue, a price different from the contract, a password that does not work, a person placing orders who never got their own login. Each can be fixed, and the list of such reasons from the first quarter is a ready-made improvement plan for the portal.
iBox - the same customers, different habits
Challenge. iBox is an electronics distributor serving retail chains in Poland. It serves more than 30 customers, each with their own price list, credit limit and payment terms, and the catalogue holds over 8,000 items from five manufacturers. Before the project every order was taken by a rep, by phone or email, and entered into the accounting system by hand. From receipt to confirmation took between 30 minutes and an hour, and for these customers the phone had been the usual way to order for years.
Solution. We built a B2B portal where the customer logs in and sees their individual price list with current availability, checks their credit limit and balance, places an order at any hour without contacting a rep, repeats a previous order with one click and downloads invoices. We did not replace the accounting system. Orders from the portal reach it on their own, so the rep stopped retyping orders.
Results. After launch iBox has 17% more orders and an 80% shorter handling time per order (figures provided by the client on 2026-09-10), with the same team and the same customer base. The same customers who used to call now order on their own, in the evenings and at weekends as well. The simplest explanation for more orders without new customers is the hours - some of the orders that used to need a call during office hours now come in when the customer has time.
Checklist for the board
Questions it helps to have answered before a conversation about the share of orders that come through the portal:
- What share of last month's orders did customers place in the portal themselves, and what share did reps take by phone or email?
- Can that be counted from the system, or do the reps have to be asked?
- Does a repeat order take less time in the portal than a call, and has anyone timed it?
- After logging in, does the customer see their contract price, their limit and their history, or a generic price list and an empty account?
- Does the rep's bonus depend on how their customers place orders?
- Who walked each customer through their first login and first order, and when?
- What is the date from which the phone is the channel for exceptions, and do customers know it?
- What happens to an order taken by phone after that date - does it go into the portal or straight into the accounting system, bypassing the portal?
- How many requests for invoices, balances and order status does the sales team handle in a week, even though each can be dealt with in the portal?
Let's talk about phone orders in your wholesale business
If the B2B portal is already there and customers still call, tell us how orders are split between the phone and the portal today, and we will say what we think is holding the change back. If there is no portal yet, go into the demo portal and check whether a repeat order can be placed there faster than by phone. More on how we build such portals is on the B2B procurement platforms page.
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