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Connectify

✦Solution

B2B customer portal

We build the customer portal on top of the systems you already have. Start with the simple things – letting customers see their own orders and download invoices themselves – and add more as the need grows.

  • Start simple from DKK 500/month on top of a Connectify integration
  • Every module connects straight to your ERP, PIM, WMS or TMS
  • We also build the parts that do not exist yet
Customer portal with an order overview: open orders, orders in transit and orders awaiting approval

In short

  • Connects: Business Central, Struct PIM, Shipmondo, Plytix and Kundeportal
  • Includes: Customers and users, Prices and agreements, Items and product data, Stock, Orders, Invoices and account statements, Deliveries
  • Delivered by: Connectify, integration specialists since 2014
  • Pricing: a fixed monthly price per integration, including operation and free support –see pricing

What it does

A portal built for your business – not for the average one

Trigger

New order in Business Central

Action

Validate and transform

Result

Created in Kundeportal

Customers handle it themselves

Order status, invoices, account statements and reordering. What arrives today as emails and phone calls becomes something the customer can find on their own – around the clock.

Business CentralKundeportal
  • Order no.Sales order
  • Customer emailCustomer
  • SKUItem no.
  • Price incl. VATUnit price

Data comes from the source

Prices, stock and orders are pulled straight from your ERP, so the customer sees exactly what you see. No exports, no copies going stale.

Sync logLive
  • Orders transferred
  • Stock updated
  • Price rejected – item no. missing
  • Price retried and transferred

You add more when you are ready

The portal does not have to be finished on day one. We start with a single module, put it live and keep building as you see what customers actually use.

Build the portal module by module

Most companies start by taking pressure off customer service and end up moving part of their sales into the portal. You decide how far you go, and how fast.

  1. Order status in the portal with delivery steps and track & trace

    01 · Self-service

    Customers find the answers themselves

    The simplest portal. The customer logs in and sees their own orders, deliveries and invoices – pulled straight from your ERP.

    • A login per customer with their own data
    • Order history and order status
    • Invoices and account statements to download
    • Delivery details and track & trace

    From DKK 500/month on top of a Connectify integration.

  2. Previous orders with a reorder button and stock status per order line

    02 · Ordering

    Customers buy directly in the portal

    The portal becomes a B2B webshop with the customer's own assortment, their own prices and everything needed to place an order without picking up the phone.

    • Customer-specific prices, discounts and quantity discounts from the ERP
    • The customer's own assortment and hidden items
    • Reordering, favourite lists and quick order entry
    • Stock status and expected delivery date
    • Basket, checkout and the order straight into the ERP
  3. An order awaiting approval, with approval steps and an amount threshold

    03 · Your business logic

    The portal follows the way you work

    This is where standard systems stop. Roles, budgets, approvals and rules that only make sense in your business – those are the ones we build.

    • Roles and permissions: buyer, approver, sales rep, administrator
    • Ordering on behalf of a colleague or a customer
    • Budgets, points or pools per user or department
    • Approval flows before the order is passed on
    • Configuration, matrix ordering and items shipped as sets

Modules we have already built

Everything below runs at customers today. Pick what you need – and ask for whatever is not on the list.

Customers, prices and access

  • Customer-specific prices and discount tiers from the ERP
  • Price groups per company or department
  • The customer's own catalogue – items can be hidden by rules
  • Sales rep login with access to their own customers
  • Several users under the same customer account
  • Customer sign-up and approval

Orders and checkout

  • Reordering and favourite lists
  • Matrix ordering across sizes and colours
  • Delivery date picker with your own rules
  • Discount codes and campaigns
  • Back orders and partial deliveries
  • Claims and crediting

Documents and data

  • Invoices and credit notes from the ERP
  • Account statements and balance overview
  • Order confirmation as PDF or Excel
  • Packing lists and consignment notes
  • Product images from Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive
  • An API, so other systems can fetch and send data

Content and product data

  • Categories, filters and search within the customer's own assortment
  • Product data and images from your PIM
  • Data sheets, certificates and manuals on the item
  • Pages and banners you edit yourself
  • Several languages and currencies
  • Item labels driven by rules, for example sustainability

Operations and security

  • Hosting, monitoring and updates
  • SSL and role-based access control
  • A log of what was transferred and when
  • Errors are caught and can be resumed
  • Test and production environments
  • Free support – on the integration too

Integration with your systems

  • ERP: Business Central, NAV, Infor M3, TRIMIT, SAP
  • PIM: Struct, Plytix and others
  • WMS and stock locations
  • Shipping: Shipmondo, Webshipper and others
  • Payment, if the portal needs to accept it
  • Bespoke systems via API or file drop

Features

What flows between the portal and your systems

Both ways

Customers and users

Customer accounts from the ERP become accounts in the portal, with several users under the same customer and the permissions each role needs.

ERP → Portal

Prices and agreements

The customer's own prices, discount tiers and campaigns are pulled from the ERP, so the portal shows the same thing your sales reps see.

ERP and PIM → Portal

Items and product data

Item numbers and stock data from the ERP, texts and images from your PIM – brought together into one catalogue the customer can navigate.

ERP / WMS → Portal

Stock

Sellable quantity per location, so the customer sees what can be shipped – and when the rest is expected in.

Portal → ERP

Orders

The order lands as a sales order in the ERP on the right customer, with the item numbers and prices the system expects.

ERP → Portal

Invoices and account statements

Posted invoices, credit notes and balances are pulled from the ERP, so the customer can find them instead of emailing you.

ERP / WMS → Portal

Deliveries

Status, consignment note and track & trace come back along the way, so the customer can see where the parcel is.

What is a B2B customer portal?

A B2B customer portal is a place where your customers can log in and handle things themselves: see their orders, download an invoice, order again and find the information they would otherwise have called or emailed about.

The difference between a portal and a webshop is who is looking. A webshop has to sell to someone who does not know you. A portal has to make daily life easier for someone who already buys from you – and who has their own prices, their own assortment and their own agreements.

That is why a portal is rarely something you buy off the shelf. It has to know your customers, and that information lives in your ERP.

Customer portal or B2B webshop?

The two terms get used interchangeably, but they do not solve the same problem.

A B2B webshop has to sell to people who do not necessarily know you. It needs to be found in Google, show a catalogue without a login, run campaigns and take payment.

A customer portal is closed. The customer logs in and sees their own: their prices, their assortment, their orders and their invoices. There is no campaign page and often no card payment – invoicing happens as it always has, on the terms held in the ERP.

The difference matters for what has to be built. A webshop needs product copy, images and search engine optimisation. A portal needs access control, pricing logic and order history to be correct – because the customer notices immediately if a price is wrong.

Many companies end up with both: the same data behind, two different front doors.

Start with what takes up the most time

Most of the companies we talk to have the same experience: customer service spends a lot of time answering questions the system has already answered.

  • “When is my order arriving?”
  • “Could I get the invoice for March again?”
  • “What was it we paid for that item?”
  • “Can you send the same items as last time?”

That is what the first version of the portal solves. The customer logs in, sees their own orders with status and delivery date, and downloads the invoices they need. It requires no new webshop and no change to the way you work – only that data flows from your ERP out to the customer.

That version costs from DKK 500/month on top of a Connectify integration.

Invoice overview in the portal with status, balance and account statements

Invoices and account statements, without anyone having to go looking

It sounds like the simplest feature on the list, and technically it is. But there are a few decisions you have to make before it works the way it should.

Where does the invoice live? In Business Central the posted sales invoice can be generated as a PDF directly, or pulled from the document archive you already use. If the older invoices sit in a previous ERP, we have to decide whether they come along – and how far back.

Posted documents only. Drafts and unposted invoices must never show up at the customer. That is one of the mistakes that costs the most trust if it slips through.

Credit notes belong there too. If the customer only sees invoices, their own accounts look wrong. Credit notes are therefore shown in the same list, with the amount as a negative.

Balance and overdue items come from the customer ledger entries, not from the invoice list. Those are what let the customer see what is actually outstanding – and save your finance team from chasing payments the customer has already made.

Invoice list in the customer portal with PDF download and balance

Add more once you know what works

Once self-service is running, the numbers show you what customers actually use. That is a far better basis for deciding the next step than a requirements workshop.

The next step is typically ordering: the customer can place an order directly in the portal, with their own prices and their own assortment. After that come the things that are specific to you – roles, approvals, budgets or item configuration.

Because every module connects to your systems through the same integration, adding something later does not get more expensive. The foundation is already in place.

The customer’s own prices – and why that is the hard part

The price is the first thing the customer checks. Pricing logic is rarely what takes longest to build, but it is almost always what takes longest to agree on.

In an ERP like Business Central the price on a line can come from several places at once: a sales price on the item, a campaign price with validity dates, a price on the customer’s price group, a line discount on the item group, and a quantity discount that only kicks in above a certain quantity. The order of precedence is not always obvious.

There are essentially two ways to do it:

  • Ask the ERP every time. The portal requests the price when the customer adds to the basket. It is always correct, but it requires the ERP to answer fast enough.
  • Mirror the pricing logic in the portal. Faster for the customer, but you now have two places where the price rules live – and they have to be kept identical.

We usually recommend the first, and let the ERP recalculate the order when it is created. That way the customer can never end up ordering at a price you cannot honour.

On top of that come VAT, currency and export. A customer in Germany has to see prices without Danish VAT, in euros, and with the delivery terms that apply to them. It is not difficult, but it has to be decided before anything is built.

Basket in the customer portal with a quantity discount and the customer’s own price, and the order created in Business Central

Who can order what – and for how much?

At a small customer the same person orders every time. At a large customer there is a buyer, a department manager, a finance director and five warehouses that each have their own consumption.

The portal can handle both, but it requires three things to be in place:

Roles. Who may see prices, who may order, who has to approve, and who may create new users at the customer. That last one is worth thinking about: if the customer can add their own colleagues, you do not have to.

Approval rules. Typically an amount – orders above DKK 25,000 go past the finance director – but it can also be an item group, a department or a project. The rule also has to cover what happens when the approver is on holiday.

Budgets. Some customers want a ceiling per department, project or period. The budget can live in the portal, or it can be pulled from the dimensions in your ERP if it is already managed there. When an order exceeds it, the order can either be blocked, sent for approval or go through with a note – that is the customer’s choice, not yours.

It sounds administrative, but it is often what decides whether the large customers move their purchasing into the portal. The more control they have themselves, the less they need to call you.

Budget overview per department in the customer portal with an overrun that requires approval

What standard systems cannot do

Some workflows simply do not have a plugin. A few examples of what we have built:

Budgets instead of prices. A company whose customers order workwear for their employees did not want kroner in the portal. Instead, each employee was given a pool of points, which the customer’s own administrator could allocate, move between colleagues and top up. When an employee ran short of points, a single click sent a request to the person in charge, who received an email with the contents of the basket.

Items shipped as sets. The same portal had to send three order lines to the ERP when the employee picked a single item: the garment plus two logo prints in different sizes. The customer sees one item, the ERP gets what production needs.

Stock on something that is not an item. Customer-specific logos were kept in stock per size, and when the quantity ran low the customer was automatically notified to order more – otherwise the garments could not be ordered at all.

Ordering on behalf of others. The person in charge at the customer could place orders for their employees, and the order recorded who had ordered for whom.

None of this is standard. All of it was built because that is how the business worked.

Integration with your existing systems

A customer portal is not an island. It has to work together with the systems that already own the data – otherwise it becomes one more place someone has to maintain by hand.

Systems typically connected:

During the scoping we agree which system owns which information. It sounds technical, but it is the decision that determines whether the portal is easy or painful to live with: when one system owns the price, the others cannot overwrite it.

How a portal project runs

Scoping (free). We go through your systems, your customers and the workflows that take up the most time. The result is a list of modules in an order that makes sense – and a price.

Data foundation. Before anything can be shown, we need to know what is there. Are the customer accounts maintained? Do the items have images and texts, or do those have to come from a PIM? Are there email addresses for the people who are meant to log in? This is where most projects get delayed – not in the development.

First module live. We finish the one module and put it in the air, instead of waiting until everything is ready.

Pilot with a handful of customers. Five to ten customers, ideally the ones who call the most. In a week they find what would otherwise take us a month to test our way to.

Rollout and the next module. The rest of the customers get access, and you decide from what you can now see in the numbers what should be built next.

The simple self-service portal can be live in a few weeks, because it builds on data we already move. Ordering with prices and roles typically takes a few months.

What you should settle before you start

The questions below are the ones we always ask. You may as well take them in advance – most of them are business decisions, not technical ones.

  • Who is the user? One person per customer account, or several people each with their own role?
  • How do they get in? Do you invite them, can they sign themselves up, or should they log in with their own company account?
  • Which price applies? And which system owns it when there is a disagreement?
  • How far back should the history go? Two years? Everything? Including what sits in the old ERP?
  • What happens when an item is out of stock? May the customer order anyway, see an expected date, or neither?
  • May anyone order on behalf of others? Both at the customer and at your end.
  • What happens if the order cannot be created in the ERP? Who is notified, and what does the customer see?
  • Who maintains the content – the product copy, the categories, the front page?

If you can answer those eight questions, you have effectively specified the portal.

What determines the price?

The simple self-service portal – login, order history and invoices – costs from DKK 500/month on top of a Connectify integration. From there the price depends on five things:

  1. How many modules you choose. Each module is priced separately, so you can start small.
  2. Whether the pricing logic can be pulled from the ERP. If it can, it is quick. If it has to be rebuilt or mirrored, it takes longer.
  3. How many roles and rules there have to be. A portal with one type of user is a different thing from one with buyers, approvers and budgets per department.
  4. Whether the product data exists. If you have a PIM with texts and images, it is straightforward. If the data has to be gathered from spreadsheets, that is a job in itself.
  5. Whether we have to build something that does not exist yet. We are happy to – but it is priced separately.

You get the price for all of it before we start, and the scoping costs nothing.

What you get out of it

Fewer enquiries. What arrives today as emails becomes something the customer finds themselves.

More orders. When reordering is easy and the prices are right, customers order more often – including outside your opening hours.

Fewer errors. The order arrives exactly as it was placed, instead of being retyped from an email.

A better starting point for selling. You can see what customers are looking at, and what they cannot find.

How to get started

We start with a free scoping session, where we go through your systems, your customers and the workflows that take up the most time. Then we propose a first module that can stand on its own and deliver value straight away – and lay out a plan for what can follow.

You get the price for all of it before we start.

Customer story

Proven at customers like Arcane Tinmen

37 %

of orders came through the B2B portal after one month

Arcane Tinmen

How Arcane Tinmen's distributors worldwide can restock across several locations themselves

Arcane Tinmen sells gaming accessories to distributors worldwide, but there was no customer portal that could talk to their ERP. With an integration between the B2B portal and the ERP, the distributors can now restock 100+ order lines across several locations themselves – and after three months, 95 per cent of all orders came through the portal.

Read the story

We've got the answers

Frequently asked questions

What does a customer portal cost?

The simplest portal – where customers log in, see their orders and download invoices themselves – costs from DKK 500/month on top of a Connectify integration. If you need more than that, we price it based on the modules you choose. The scoping is always free, and you get the price before we start.

Do we have to change ERP or webshop to get a portal?

No. The portal is built on top of the systems you already have. That is the whole point: the data stays in the ERP, and the portal shows it to the customer. We have built portals on top of Business Central, NAV, Infor M3, TRIMIT and SAP.

How long does it take to get started?

The simple self-service portal can be live in a few weeks, because it draws on data we already move. A portal with ordering, roles and approval flows takes longer – typically a few months – and we put it live in stages, so you get value along the way.

Can customers have different prices and assortments?

Yes. Each customer can have their own prices, discount tiers and their own catalogue, where items can be hidden by rules. The pricing logic is pulled from the ERP, so it is the same logic your sales reps work from.

Can several people at the same customer each have their own access?

Yes. One customer can have many users, each with their own role – for example a buyer who orders, an approver who has to say yes, and an administrator who manages the rest. We have also built portals where one user can order on behalf of a colleague.

What if we have a workflow no standard solution supports?

Then we build it. Among other things we have made portals with budgets and point pools per employee, ordering on behalf of others, stock control of customer-specific prints, and items that are sent to the ERP as sets. If you can describe the workflow, we can usually build it.

Which systems can you integrate with?

ERP, PIM, WMS, TMS, shipping, payment and bespoke systems. If you have a system we have not met before, we look into it during the scoping – if there is an API or a file exchange, we can usually connect to it. See all integrations.

Who runs the portal afterwards?

We do. Hosting, monitoring, updates and support are included in the fixed monthly price – also when an API changes and the integration has to be adjusted.

See all integrations +

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