B2B Customer Self-Service Portal

The problem

Wholesale buyers do not want to email the sales desk. They want to log in at seven in the morning, pull up what they bought last quarter, see their own price, check whether it is in stock, and place the reorder. Instead they send a PDF or a WhatsApp message, someone at your end reads it, keys a Sales Order into SAP Business One, and emails back to ask which of two similar item codes was meant.

Every step of that costs you twice. Your internal team spends its day as a transcription service instead of selling, and transcription introduces errors: the wrong item code, last year's price, a quantity below the minimum order multiple. Meanwhile the same customer calls to ask for a copy of an invoice from four months ago, or where a Delivery is, or what their outstanding balance is, and someone has to stop and go look it up. Customers who are used to buying from anyone with a working portal quietly conclude you are harder to deal with than the alternative.

What ECOSIRE builds

ECOSIRE builds a per-tenant B2B self-service portal that reads from and writes to your SAP Business One company database, so it is not a separate system to reconcile.

Authenticated per-customer access

Portal users are linked to a Business Partner, with multiple contacts per account and multiple ship-to addresses drawn from the Business Partner master. Roles control what each contact can do: browse only, place orders, approve orders above a value, view financials. A single buying group can be given access to several Business Partner codes where a parent buys for multiple branches.

Contract pricing that is actually theirs

The portal resolves price through SAP Business One's own pricing hierarchy: Price Lists assigned to the Business Partner, Special Prices for Business Partner and item, period and quantity discounts, and Discount Groups. A buyer sees their contracted price, not a list price with a promise of a discount later. Currency follows the Business Partner. Where you prefer not to expose price at all to certain accounts, that is a role setting.

Catalogue, stock and reordering

Items are published from the Item Master with the descriptions, units of measure, barcodes, item groups and images you choose to expose. Availability is shown per Warehouse using in-stock, committed and ordered quantities, presented as a policy you define, from an exact figure to a banded indicator, so you are not obliged to publish precise stock levels to competitors' customers. Buyers reorder from order history, from a saved list, or by pasting a list of item codes and quantities. Minimum order quantities and packing multiples are enforced at entry rather than discovered later by your sales desk.

Orders posted into SAP Business One

A submitted basket creates a real Sales Order through the Service Layer, against the correct Business Partner, ship-to address, currency, price list, payment terms and sales employee. Orders can be configured to post directly, or to land as a draft document for internal review, or to route through a SAP Business One approval procedure when they exceed a value or credit threshold. Credit limit and account-on-hold status are respected: a blocked account is told clearly rather than silently accepted.

Order, delivery and financial visibility

Buyers see the live status of their Sales Orders including open and delivered quantities, linked Deliveries with tracking references held in User-Defined Fields, and their A/R Invoices with a downloadable PDF generated from your own Crystal Reports layout. An account statement view shows open items, ageing and outstanding balance, driven by the same data your collections team uses. Where you have a payment channel, an invoice can carry a pay link, with the resulting Incoming Payment posted against the invoice.

Quotes, backorders and returns

Buyers can request a quotation, which arrives as a Sales Quotation for your team to price and return through the portal. Backordered lines are shown honestly as backordered with the expected date from the linked Purchase Order rather than hidden. Return requests are captured as a structured request with reason and quantity for your team to convert into a Return document.

Administration inside SAP Business One

Portal configuration, published catalogue scope, user roles and stock-display policy are maintained through User-Defined Object forms in the SAP Business One client, so your team administers the portal from where they already work rather than in a second admin console.

Who this is for

Distributors, wholesalers and manufacturers selling to trade accounts on negotiated pricing; businesses whose sales desk spends most of its time keying customer orders received by email; and companies with a repeat-purchase catalogue where the same accounts reorder the same items on a predictable cycle.

Technical approach

The portal is a web application communicating with SAP Business One exclusively through the Service Layer (OData/REST), with the DI API used server-side for objects or posting behaviour not exposed there. It never writes directly to company database tables. Extensibility uses User-Defined Fields on Business Partners, Contacts, Sales Orders and Deliveries for portal references and tracking data, User-Defined Tables for portal users, roles, saved lists and request queues, and User-Defined Objects for the in-client administration forms. Invoice PDFs come from your Crystal Reports layouts. It supports SAP Business One 10.0 on Microsoft SQL Server or SAP HANA, on-premise or cloud-hosted, and is deployed to infrastructure you control with TLS, per-customer data isolation enforced server-side, and no exposure of the Service Layer directly to the internet.

How delivery works

The portal is built for your catalogue and pricing after a quotation. It is not a subscription you switch on.

1. Scoping call. We go through which Business Partners and items you want exposed, your pricing structures, stock-display policy, whether orders post directly or as drafts, approval and credit rules, invoice layout, ship-to handling, branding, and your SAP Business One version, database and hosting arrangement. 2. Fixed quote. You receive a written scope with a fixed price and timeline before development begins. The listed price reflects a typical scope; payment-channel integration, multi-company operation or unusual pricing logic are quoted as explicit additions. 3. Build. Lead time is normally two to four weeks depending on catalogue complexity, pricing rules, branding depth and whether a payment channel is included. 4. Install in test. The portal is connected to your test company database first, loaded with real Business Partners and price lists, and walked through end to end: login, price resolution, availability, order posting, approval routing, invoice download. 5. Production install. After sign-off we deploy against the production company database, onboard a pilot group of customers before opening it more widely, and monitor the first live orders. 6. Support. A defined support window follows go-live for defect fixes and configuration adjustments, and you receive the source code so you are never locked in.