In this guide 6 sections
Write down what dealers must do without calling you: log in, see their tier price list, check credit limit and statement, place orders, raise claims and view schemes. Then test each option on ERP sync, dealer onboarding and support, because those answers show whether a bought portal will fit or a custom build is worth its cost.
Define the portal by what a dealer does in a day
Start with the phone calls. Sales desks hear the same questions daily: the landed rate of a variant, an account balance, a dispatch status with the lorry’s expected arrival and whether a scheme applies. Each call is a screen. The portal should replace it.
List the screens first, before any vendor demo. A website with a password is no portal. The real thing is a set of views onto your price list, ledger and order book, cut down to one dealer at a time.
Keep the first release small: no loyalty points, no sub-dealer hierarchies, no mobile app, only the screens that dealers open every single day. Five screens used daily beat fifteen used once.
- Dealer login with separate users for the owner, the accountant and the counter staff
- Price list shown by dealer tier, so a silver dealer never sees the gold slab rates or the distributor margin
- Credit limit, outstanding invoices, overdue ageing and a downloadable statement
- Order entry from the SKU master, with a repeat-last-order button and a proforma invoice
- Claims for transit damage, short supply, breakage or a wrong shipment, with photos, a credit note reference and a status
- Current schemes, volume slabs, rebate accruals and the dealer’s own progress towards each slab
Ask who owns the data, because the portal only shows it
The portal holds little data of its own. Prices come from the ERP or an Excel sheet, credit limits and post-dated cheque registers sit with accounts receivable, and stock figures sit with the warehouse.
Ask each vendor how a changed price reaches the dealer, and whether it travels as a nightly file, a live API call or a manual upload. A stale tier price breeds disputes. A credit note or debit note follows.
Ask what dealers see when the ERP is down, because a portal that freezes along with it is simply a second outage with your dealers watching.
- Which ERP versions the connector has already been used with
- How often prices, stock and ledger balances refresh, and who can force a refresh
- Whether dealer orders land as drafts for your order desk or post straight into sales orders against the warehouse
- How a rejected order or a credit hold is shown back to the dealer
Credit and order rules need an owner on your side
A portal makes credit control visible. That is its biggest benefit. It is also its biggest argument. If a dealer is over the limit, does the order stop, wait for approval from the credit controller, or go through with a warning?
Settle this with the finance head and credit controller before any build starts, along with minimum order quantity, pack sizes, same-day cut-off hour and the treatment of uncleared cheques. Decide each one in writing.
Write each rule as a sentence a dealer could read, because plain rules make plain screens and vague ones breed support tickets for your sales coordinator.
Onboarding and support decide whether dealers log in at all
Many portals fail quietly. Dealers get a link, try it once, as sub-dealers often do, and drift back to WhatsApp because of a clumsy first login, a forgotten password or nobody to ask. The cause is rarely the software.
Ask how a dealer gets onboarded. Can you import two hundred dealers with tier, territory, tax registration number and contact from one spreadsheet, validating each number, without keying each dealer by hand? Can a dealer reset a password alone? Does it work on a phone?
Ask who answers when a dealer cannot find a tax invoice or a freight receipt, and if the answer is your sales coordinator, budget her hours and count them.
- Bulk import of dealers from a CSV file, with tier, territory and salesperson mapping
- Self-service password reset and an invite email in the dealer’s language
- A short video or one-page guide you can send with the invite
- A support route for portal faults that is separate from order queries
Build or buy comes down to how unusual your rules are
Buy when your needs fit the common pattern. Tier prices, credit view, orders and statements are standard, and a ready portal goes live sooner because upkeep is shared across the vendor’s other customers.
Build when your rules are the business itself. Think of project-based quotations, price-protection claims, multi-level distributor chains, scheme maths that changes by territory or rebates settled after quarter end, where a standard tool bends until it breaks.
Either way, pilot first. Pick ten real dealers across two territories. Then collect every question those ten dealers send your team over a month, because that list becomes your second-phase plan and your support budget.
Dealer portal build or buy worksheet
This sheet has three blocks. The first lists portal screens down the left (price list, statement, order entry, claims, schemes) with columns for must-have, nice-to-have and vendor A, vendor B or build. The second holds the ERP sync questions. The third scores onboarding, support and pilot terms from one to five, with a running total beneath for each option under review.
Open a blank worksheet to printQuestions owners ask
Can a dealer portal replace our sales coordinator?
No, because it removes only routine calls about rates, balances and order status, while exceptions, schemes and relationships still need a person. Her time moves to onboarding and claims.
Should dealers see live stock?
Only if your stock records are trusted. Many firms show an in-stock or low-stock flag instead of exact quantities, which avoids promises the warehouse cannot keep and still saves most of the calls.
How long does a portal take to roll out?
It depends on how clean your item master and dealer list are, and cleaning them often takes longer than the portal itself. Pilot first. Widen the group once orders flow correctly.
What if our ERP is old or has no API?
A portal can still work through scheduled exports or a small integration layer, though updates will lag behind the ledger, so demand a demo on your exact ERP version.