Why opt for a B2B customer portal? The benefits and challenges for your company

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Social networks, online research, more direct relationships with customers: B2B commerce is evolving. Professional buyers are looking for a user-friendly, personalized experience, and attach great importance to the responsiveness and availability of online information.

The freedom and convenience provided by an ordering portal have become essential differentiation criteria for remaining competitive in an increasingly competitive sector. But a B2B customer portal can bring many other benefits: transparency of offers, acceleration of the sales cycle, removal of disincentives to purchase... We invite you to examine how an online platform can positively address the challenges of business-to-business commercial relations.


In this article :

1. What is a B2B customer portal?
2. How has B2C influenced B2B commerce?
3. What are the advantages of a B2B web portal?
The benefits of a digital platform for your customers
➔ Freedom and autonomy
➔ Simplification of the purchasing process
➔ Reduced processing times
The benefits of an online platform for your company
➔ Reduced workload
➔ Improved profitability
4. How can you meet the specific challenges of the B2B sector with a web portal?
Complex, hyper-personalized customer paths
Long business relationships accentuating the importance of the post-purchase phase
5. What are the trends in B2B customer portals?
Digital transformation and new technologies put the web portal in the spotlight
The web portal as a tool for constant innovation

1. What is a B2B customer portal?

A B2B customer portal is an online platform designed for business-to-business interaction. It often differs from a B2C (Business-to-Consumer) portal, also referred to as a customer space, by more complex features.

A BtoB platform is aimed at manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers, distributors and other partners involved in business-to-business trade. It enables them to manage all stages of their relationships in a dematerialized way, integrating, for example :

  • placing and tracking orders
  • logistics and inventory management;
  • a ticket-opening tool for customer support;
  • predictive product recommendations, tailored to buyers' needs based on their interests or order history;
  • a subscription system for regular delivery of consumables without the need to contact a salesperson.

Such a tool represents an asset for companies, helping them to optimize and automate their business processes, respond to the market's need for simplicity and speed, and personalize the experience of their interlocutors.

Need advice on building your web portal? This decision tree might help

2. How has B2C influenced B2B commerce?

For many years now, consumers have been enjoying digitalized, personalized customer experiences, fully supported by new technologies. BtoC users are accustomed to immediacy in their commercial interactions and ease of use. The use of online services, on the Internet or via applications, is part of their daily lives and has become a matter of course.

As a result, B2C companies have taken these requirements on board and are constantly offering more advanced digital experiences. The B2B sector, on the other hand, has been slower to renew its practices. Business buyers are also consumers, and they increasingly expect the same standards in all their activities. The COVID-19 pandemic has only served to highlight the changing needs of users in terms of digitalization and autonomy.

Today, purchasing departments favor service providers who offer personalized, self-service and omnichannel experiences. A poorly optimized customer journey, in which finalizing a transaction takes too long, proves prohibitive. For example, according to Gartner, 83% of B2B buyers prefer to order and pay online.

The web portal is the ideal tool for meeting these extremely high expectations, which now also apply to B2B suppliers.

3. What are the advantages of a B2B web portal?

A win-win tool: increase customer satisfaction, while optimizing your organization.

The benefits of a digital platform for your customers

➔ Freedom and autonomy

Thanks to your web portal, your customers are no longer dependent on your opening hours or the availability of your staff. Self-service has its place in B2B business relationships, providing buyers with the resources they need to make informed choices, quickly answer their questions and activate the online services that suit them, at any time. What's more, a digital platform has the advantage of being adaptable to all media: computer, tablet or telephone.

As a result, your offer gains in accessibility, whatever the processes and habits of the various departments involved among your customers.

➔ Simplifying the purchasing process

Ease of use has become an essential criterion for purchasing teams. With a user-friendly, user-oriented interface, your B2B portal becomes a powerful competitive asset. This makes the entire customer journey much smoother.

Customer Journey on a B2B web portal

What's more, access to all information and tools in just a few clicks ensures transparent interactions, in an industry where offers can be complex.

Eliminating friction points during the purchasing process also helps to build customer loyalty. Indeed, if your interlocutors encounter difficulties finding your contact details or placing an order, they are increasingly likely to turn to the competition.

➔ Reduced processing times

Today's users are used to benefiting from real-time responsiveness. Too long a response time will be perceived as a breach in your relationship. As a result, companies need to be able to meet customer expectations quickly, whether it's to provide answers, supply products or services, or resolve a problem.

A BtoB portal offers your customers a multitude of resources that can be accessed immediately: knowledge base, FAQ, forum, self-service tools, instant messaging. What's more, automating repetitive tasks boosts your teams' efficiency when interacting with users.

Not only do you avoid late returns, but you also reduce your risk of error: the information provided can be extracted directly from the appropriate sources, such as your ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM(Customer Relationship Management) or PIM(Product Information Management) solution.

The benefits of an online platform for your company

➔ Reduced workload

A customer portal can become a fruitful tool for your staff, saving them time and boosting productivity. Users manage their personal accounts themselves and are able to solve certain problems on their own. Your teams can therefore concentrate on value-added issues, and be more responsive to urgent needs.

This also applies to your sales teams, who can spend more time developing quality relationships. They also gain in efficiency, thanks to real-time updates on the status of quotes, orders and deliveries, as well as segmented sales statistics. What's more, the web portal provides a centralized, transparent and structured communication channel with their contacts.

Thanks to these optimizations, you can increase employee satisfaction. Indeed, the provision of high-performance, tailored tools, which ensure greater flexibility and facilitate the implementation of teleworking, represents a loyalty-building factor.

➔ Improved profitability

Increasing the efficiency of your teams translates into cost reductions, particularly in your support department. And more globally, optimizing inventory management, automating processes and streamlining interactions save your company money.

Find out more about the construction of the Xerox B2B customer portal

4. How can a web portal meet the specific challenges of the B2B sector?

B2B structures are still lagging behind when it comes to digitizing the customer journey. Of course, business-to-business trade presents different challenges to those encountered in B2C. But it's precisely the functionalities offered by an online platform that meet the essential criteria of business-to-business relationships.

Complex, hyper-personalized customer paths

The needs of BtoB users are less amenable to standardization than those of BtoC users, where common requests are commonplace. What's more, your customer is a multi-departmental organization with a wide range of expectations. The selection of a supplier takes into account the opinions of these different departments, and the follow-up of the commercial relationship is generally shared between several contacts, each with their own objectives. B2B purchasing processes tend to be longer and more technical, requiring multiple points of contact.

As a result, personalization requirements are more demanding: you need to meet the special needs of each portion of your customer base, and all teams need to be able to collaborate throughout the personalized customer journey you've devised for them.

A digital platform achieves these goals:

  • It can integrate multiple roles, with personalized rights for each.
  • It materializes differentiated customer paths, bringing greater simplicity to your users.

Long-lasting business relationships, emphasizing the importance of the post-purchase phase

B2B relationships tend to be long-lasting and deep-rooted, involving regular transactions, in contrast to the more occasional nature of consumer purchases. This is why suppliers seek to build a solid bond, in order to maximize user satisfaction and loyalty. To this end, the quality and availability of the services offered play a key role. The functionalities of a customer portal make it possible to offer optimal online services.

Indeed, a company targeting a B2B audience needs to be able not only to respond precisely to their needs, but also to anticipate them. The customer data collected via your platform is therefore invaluable for refining and updating your knowledge of your users, and ensuring that you offer them relevant digital services.

In the BtoB sector in particular, there are many opportunities to stand out from the competition in the post-purchase phase. At this stage, the development of a quality supplier-customer relationship relies on omnichannel experiences, enabling users to move easily from online services to human exchanges.

Explore the possibilities offered by omnichannel with Jahia!

In particular, a dedicated and responsive support service plays a key role in customer satisfaction. And yet, the incidents encountered by companies are likely to be urgent and technical. So self-service documentation and an efficient ticket processing tool are essential.

5. What are the trends in B2B customer portals?

BtoB commerce has undergone a major evolution in recent years, and this movement towards digitization of relationships is placing the online platform at the heart of the sector's marketing strategies.

Digital transformation and new technologies put the web portal in the spotlight

The B2B buying journey has been marked by increasing digitalization: social networks and online research have taken on considerable importance. Companies are therefore developing omnichannel strategies, and B2B sales are becoming increasingly hybrid.

In fact, BtoB players who invest in improving their customer experience, taking into account the digital expectations of their targets, are doing well and increasing their market share.

This influence of digital transformation is a long-term trend. All the more so as the new generations of B2B buyers are demonstrating a strong digital orientation: their demands in this area are likely to continue to grow.

In view of all this, the B2B portal has a bright future ahead of it, and B2B players have every interest in integrating it into their digital strategy.

The web portal as a tool for constant innovation

B2B structures are constantly evolving: they need to take account of technological advances and adapt their offerings. They regularly modify their services, communication methods and processes.

Your digital portal enables you to keep pace with these constant innovations, provided you choose a flexible, scalable management solution. In this respect, choosing a modulith Digital Experience Platform (DXP) will give you the flexibility you need, without compromising its reliability and ease of use for your internal teams. So you can stay innovative, simply by adding new features or tools to your B2B online platform.


A customer portal offers a wide range of features to meet the specific challenges and evolutions of B2B business. If you'd like to find out more about building your B2B platform, take a look at the key features of the Jahia portal solution!

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