B2B commerce is selling to the businesses that resell, install or consume what you make — dealers, distributors, stockists, workshops and key accounts. It is not a smaller version of consumer commerce. The buyer has negotiated terms, an outstanding balance, a credit limit and a scheme entitlement, and they are ordering a hundred lines at a time from a phone in a market with no signal.
What makes a B2B order different
- The price is not the price. Every account trades on its own price list and discount group. The same item is a different number for a metro distributor and a rural stockist, and neither should ever see the other's.
- Promotions are contractual. Trade schemes — buy ten get one, slab discounts, value offers — are commitments, not marketing. They have to be evaluated on the order itself so the buyer sees what they earned while they are still ordering.
- Credit is a gate, not a report. A dealer over their limit should be stopped when the order is saved, not discovered at month end.
- The network is optional. Field ordering happens in basements, warehouses and villages. An order taken offline has to be a real order the moment connectivity returns.
Ordering that feels like shopping
The buying surface is a merchandised catalogue, not a stock list: marketing names, images, highlights and offer badges, browsable by category or searchable, with quantities in whatever unit the buyer thinks in — piece, case, or pallet. Reordering runs off barcode scanning and previously-ordered lists, because a shop refilling its shelves is repeating a decision rather than making a new one.
Where the catalogue is technical — spares, assemblies, machine parts — buyers find the exact item by touching it on an exploded-parts diagram rather than guessing at a part number. Wrong-part returns are a distribution cost that catalogue design can actually remove.
Terms that follow the account, automatically
Pricing, discounts and schemes are resolved by the platform's own engines against the account placing the order — the same engines the back office uses when it types an order in by hand. There is no second pricing implementation for the self-service channel, which is the usual source of the complaint that the portal quoted one number and the invoice showed another.
Credit exposure is checked where it matters. An account past its limit, or with overdue outstanding beyond the tolerance, is stopped at save with an explanation rather than allowed through to become a collections problem.
Dealer self-service, without a second system
A dealer ordering for themselves through a portal, a field rep ordering on their behalf during a visit, and the back office keying an order from a phone call all produce the same document. It is one order pipeline: allocation, fulfilment, delivery, invoice and collection behave identically regardless of where the order came from. Reporting does not have to be reconciled across channels because there are no channels to reconcile — only a field recording where each order originated.
Where it goes next
Most distributors who put dealers online eventually get asked the next question: can the dealer sell onward, to their own customers, on your range. That is B2B2C — and because the partner storefront is a channel over the store the dealer already resolves to, it is an extension of this model rather than a second build.
Common questions
Do dealer orders and back-office orders end up in the same place?
Yes. A dealer self-service order, a field-visit order and a keyed order are the same document with the same lifecycle. The channel it arrived through is recorded on the order; it does not put the order in a different system or a different report.
Can each dealer see their own prices?
Yes. Pricing resolves against the account placing the order, using the price list and discount group assigned to it. A buyer never sees another account's terms, and the self-service surface uses the same pricing engine as the back office rather than a copy of it.
What happens when a dealer is over their credit limit?
The order is stopped at save with the reason shown, rather than accepted and discovered later. Credit exposure and overdue tolerance are checked as part of saving the order.
Does dealer ordering work without a network?
Yes on mobile. Orders taken offline are captured locally and submitted when connectivity returns, including their lines — an order taken in a basement is a real order, not a note to re-enter later.
Do we need a portal to let dealers order?
No. Dealer ordering runs inside the platform's own web and mobile apps. A portal is for when you want buyers on an external site of your own, signed in under their own identity.