If you manufacture a product and sell it through a dealer or reseller network, your order desk probably still runs on phone calls, faxes, and emailed spreadsheets. A dealer portal moves that online: every dealer signs in, sees their own pricing, and orders themselves, while your team stops rekeying. This is a specific kind of B2B portal, and the dealer-network requirements make it its own project.
We build dealer portals for manufacturers on Shopware and Adobe Commerce, integrated with the ERP that runs the business. This page covers what a dealer portal has to do, how it differs from a customer portal, and where the real work sits.
Why manufacturers put their dealers online
The case is rarely about a website. It is about the order desk and the dealer relationship:
- Order capture off the phone. Dealers reorder known products constantly. Every one placed by phone or fax is a call your team fields and rekeys, with the transposition errors that come with it.
- Self-service at any hour. A dealer placing a restock at 6am or on a Saturday is an order you would otherwise capture on Monday.
- Correct pricing, every time. Dealers buy at negotiated tier pricing. When they can see their real price online, the “what do I actually pay” calls stop and they trust the channel.
- A better dealer experience. The manufacturers that make ordering easy get more of a dealer’s wallet. Friction sends dealers to the competitor whose portal just works.
What a dealer portal has to do that a customer portal does not
A dealer resells your product, and that changes the requirements. On top of the standard portal features, dealer portals need some combination of:
- Dealer-tier and territory pricing. Price by dealer tier, by territory, or by contract, resolved per account from the ERP, sometimes with different pricing for different product lines.
- Co-op, rebate, and program visibility. Dealers want to see accrued co-op dollars, rebate status, and program eligibility alongside their orders.
- Order rules. Minimums, case or pallet quantities, and unit-of-measure conversions specific to how dealers buy.
- Drop-ship and dealer-of-record logic. Some orders ship to the dealer; some drop-ship to the dealer’s own customer while the dealer stays the account of record.
- Rep-assisted ordering. Field and inside reps place orders on behalf of their dealers, at the dealer’s pricing, into the same flow. We cover this pattern in our guide to sales rep order entry.
If you are still sorting out which of these you actually need, our breakdown of dealer portal versus customer portal versus distributor portal maps the terms to real requirements.
The ERP integration is the project
Everything account-specific in a dealer portal, pricing, credit, inventory, order history, invoices, lives in your ERP. The portal is the experience layer; the ERP is the system of record. That makes a dealer portal fundamentally an ERP integration project with a dealer-facing interface on top. The rules that resolve a dealer’s tier price, the credit checks, the inventory a dealer is allowed to see, all of it flows from the ERP, and getting that resolution correct is what decides whether dealers trust the portal.
We integrate dealer portals with the ERPs manufacturers actually run: Epicor P21, NetSuite, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Acumatica, and Sage. The pricing model, covered in our guide to matrix and multiplier pricing, is usually the first thing we scope, because it is where these projects succeed or fail.
Buy, configure, or build
Three honest routes:
- Buy a packaged dealer or channel portal when your pricing and program rules are standard and speed matters most.
- Configure a B2B commerce platform (Shopware or Adobe Commerce) as a dealer portal when your requirements are real but within a platform’s B2B feature set. This is the usual answer for mid-market manufacturers, because the portal grows into a public storefront without a rebuild.
- Build custom when territory logic, co-op programs, drop-ship, or ERP-resolved tier pricing are central, which is where packaged tools quietly break.
Our review of B2B portal software and our map of portal development companies cover the options, competitors included.
Dealer adoption is the real risk, not the build
The failure mode of a dealer portal is not that it does not work. It is that dealers keep calling anyway. A portal that half the network ignores has not replaced the order desk, it has added a second one. Adoption is a design and rollout problem, and it is worth planning for from the start:
- Pricing has to be right on day one. The first time a dealer sees a price online that does not match what their rep quoted, they stop trusting the portal and go back to the phone. Nothing recovers adoption slower than a pricing discrepancy, which is why ERP-resolved pricing is non-negotiable.
- Reorder has to be faster than a phone call. Dealers reorder known items. Order history, one-click reorder, quick order by part number, and saved lists are what make self-service genuinely less work than calling their rep.
- Roll out with your reps, not around them. When a rep introduces the portal as their tool (“place it here and I will see it”) rather than a replacement for them, dealers adopt. When reps feel bypassed, they quietly steer dealers back to phone orders.
- Pilot with your most demanding dealers. The dealers with the most complex pricing and the highest volume are the ones who will break the portal in ways that matter. Get them working before the broad rollout, not after.
How a dealer portal project actually runs
A dealer portal is built in phases, and the sequence matters because the highest-risk piece ships to a test environment earliest:
- Discovery against your ERP and pricing (2 to 4 weeks). Dealer tiers, territory rules, program pricing, credit, and how orders reach you today. This is where the real scope lives, and it is why we do not quote a fixed build before it.
- Pricing and account resolution first (built early, tested continuously). Dealer login mapped to the ERP account, tier and territory pricing resolved correctly. It is the highest-risk item, so it goes to staging before anything else.
- Ordering, history, and invoices. The self-service core: quick order, reorder, order tracking across every channel, and open AR.
- Dealer-specific features. Co-op and program visibility, drop-ship logic, minimums, and rep-assisted ordering, scoped to what your network actually needs.
- Pilot, then phased rollout. A small group of real dealers, reconciled order by order in the ERP with your team, before the network-wide launch.
A focused first release usually goes live in 10 to 16 weeks. Territory logic, co-op programs, and drop-ship extend that. The honest driver of timeline is how much of your pricing and program logic is standard versus bespoke, not the storefront work.
Portal first, storefront later
For most manufacturers the dealer portal is the right first digital-commerce project, ahead of any public-facing store. It converts order volume you already have to self-service without a merchandising program, and because it is built on a commerce platform, it becomes the foundation a public or direct-to-consumer storefront can grow from later without a rebuild. We make that sequencing argument in full in our portal-first playbook, and it applies to dealer networks with equal force.
Who we are
Web Solutions NYC builds dealer and B2B portals for manufacturers and distributors, with ERP-resolved pricing as the thing we scope before anything else. We are a Shopware Platinum Partner and the first Shopware agency in the US, and an official Adobe Commerce partner, and we integrate with Epicor P21, NetSuite, SAP, Dynamics, Acumatica, and Sage. Anonymized examples in our portfolio include a manufacturer whose dealers configure products and see real-time, capacity-driven lead times online.
Frequently asked questions
A dealer portal is a logged-in ordering site a manufacturer gives its dealer and reseller network: each dealer signs in and sees their own negotiated pricing, places and reorders online, checks stock and lead times, tracks orders, and views invoices, all pulled from the manufacturer’s ERP. It replaces the phone, fax, and emailed spreadsheets that dealer orders usually arrive on.
The mechanics are similar, but a dealer resells your product rather than consuming it, which adds requirements: dealer-tier and territory-based pricing, co-op or rebate visibility, minimum order rules, sometimes drop-ship to the dealer’s own customer, and rep-assisted ordering across a book of dealers. A customer portal serves end buyers; a dealer portal serves a reseller channel. We break the terms down in our guide to dealer, customer, and distributor portals.
It has to. Dealer pricing, credit, inventory, and order history all live in your ERP (Epicor P21, NetSuite, SAP, Dynamics, Acumatica, Sage), and the portal must resolve each dealer’s real pricing from those rules rather than a copied price list. The integration is the hard part and the part that decides whether dealers trust the portal enough to use it.
Yes. Order-on-behalf-of lets a rep sign in as one of their assigned dealers, see that dealer’s pricing, and place the order into the same ERP flow, so phone and rep orders become clean portal orders instead of rekeyed ones. It keeps one system of record across self-service, rep, and phone ordering.
A focused first release, dealer login mapped to ERP accounts, tier pricing, ordering, order history, and invoices, typically ships in 10 to 16 weeks. Territory logic, co-op programs, and drop-ship add scope. Built on a commerce platform like Shopware or Adobe Commerce, the portal becomes the foundation a public storefront can grow from later.
Running a dealer network on phone and fax orders? Bring us your pricing model, your ERP, and how your dealers buy. We will map what a dealer portal actually involves, including whether a lighter first phase serves you better than the full build. Let’s talk.