B2B Portals Your Customers Will Actually Want to Use

Every B2B portal is individually tailored to your customers and their procurement processes. The following feature modules form the foundation that we customize and extend for your project. All modules are designed to work both independently and in combination, integrating seamlessly into the Shopware architecture and your existing IT landscape.

Pricing in B2B is far more complex than in consumer commerce. One and the same product can be offered to different customers at entirely different terms. Framework agreements, tiered pricing, customer-specific discounts, time-limited promotional prices and currency-specific conditions must all be considered simultaneously. Our pricing module fully accommodates this complexity and ensures that every buyer sees exactly the prices negotiated for their company.

Prices are automatically synchronized via the ERP integration. Depending on requirements, this happens as a batch import at defined intervals or as a real-time query on every page load. Redis caching ensures that page load times in the portal remain fast even with hundreds of thousands of customer-specific prices. A multi-tier price fallback ensures that when a customer-specific price is missing, the group rate and finally the standard price are displayed, so no product ever appears without a price.

In addition to regular price lists, our portals support complex condition models: framework agreement prices with minimum order quantities, tiered prices that adjust dynamically based on order volume, project-specific conditions with time limits, and promotional prices for campaign periods. The entire pricing logic is displayed transparently in the shopping cart, allowing buyers to see which condition applies and what savings they achieve compared to the list price. This transparency builds your customers' trust in the accuracy of price calculations and significantly reduces inquiries to your inside sales team.

Beyond core functionality, our B2B portals offer advanced capabilities that further increase self-service adoption and reduce the load on your customer service team. These features reduce call volume for your inside sales team and give your customers the autonomy to retrieve information independently whenever they need it.

B2B buyers frequently order the same items at regular intervals. A well-designed portal makes this process as efficient as possible. The complete order history is always accessible, filterable by date range, product, order status and cost center. From any past order, the buyer can trigger a reorder with a single click, adjust individual line items or save the entire cart as a new template.

Additionally, the portal supports recurring demand management through automatic reordering. Buyers can define intervals for frequently needed items (weekly, monthly, quarterly) that automatically generate new order proposals. These proposals go through the standard approval process and can be adjusted before submission. This feature significantly reduces the effort for routine orders and ensures that consumables never run out.

Multi-level order approvals are among the most frequently requested features in B2B portals. The following flow illustrates how a typical approval process works in our portals.

A B2B portal generates valuable data about your customers' purchasing behavior. We integrate analytics and reporting features that deliver insights for both you and your customers. For your customers, this means: analyses of order volume per department, real-time budget consumption, most-ordered items and cost center reports that can be exported directly as CSV or PDF.

For your company, the portal data delivers strategic insights: Which customers use self-service most intensively? Where are there adoption gaps that require targeted onboarding? Which products are frequently searched but rarely ordered? Which search terms return no results, indicating assortment gaps? This data feeds into continuous portal optimization and helps your sales team address customer needs proactively. Performance monitoring ensures that page load times remain stable even as usage grows.

The approval processes in our B2B portals go well beyond simple thresholds. For companies with complex organizational structures, we implement multi-dimensional approval logic that simultaneously considers order value, product category, cost center and requester role. An order for office supplies under 500 euros may be auto-approved, for example, while the same amount for capital goods requires an approver. Time-based escalation rules ensure that pending approvals are automatically forwarded to a deputy after a defined period, preventing the ordering process from stalling.

For companies with matrix organizations, we offer parallel approval paths: an order can simultaneously require approval from both the department head and the budget owner. Both approvers are notified in parallel and can decide independently. Only when all required approvals are in place is the order submitted. Rejections trigger automatic notifications to the requester, optionally with the ability to revise and resubmit the order. This concept precisely maps the organizational structures captured during the consulting phase into the portal.

Our B2B portals build on Shopware Community Edition and extend it with specialized B2B functionality. The modular architecture ensures that individual feature modules can be adapted and extended independently. The separation of frontend and business logic enables future adjustments to be implemented efficiently without jeopardizing existing functionality. All B2B extensions are developed as standalone Shopware plugins that can be installed, updated and deactivated as needed through the standard plugin mechanism. This architecture ensures the Shopware core remains updatable and minimizes long-term maintenance effort.

Blanket price lists rarely do justice to an individual portal, yet without any orientation you are left in the dark. That is why we state clear starting prices for the most common build stages. The exact scope determines the price and is fixed bindingly after a free concept meeting, with no hidden items.

B2B portals vary significantly by industry. A wholesale portal with 200,000 SKUs has different requirements than a spare parts portal in mechanical engineering, where identifying the right part via bills of materials and exploded-view drawings is paramount. We bring industry-specific experience from 50+ projects and understand the particular requirements of the following sectors.

The most technically advanced portal delivers no value if your customers do not adopt it. That is why we accompany the rollout with a carefully designed onboarding concept and a phased launch rather than a big-bang go-live. Integrating the portal into existing procurement workflows via OCI punchout and single sign-on lowers the barrier to entry even further.

Each industry places its own demands on a B2B portal. The following three scenarios show how differently the priorities fall and how we tailor the portal to each.