B2B ecommerce and dealer portals in Pune
Your dealers phone for rates, ask what is in stock, and send orders on WhatsApp that someone re-types into Tally. A portal gives each of them their own prices, their own credit position and a repeat-order button.
This is the work we do most in the PCMC industrial belt, and it is not a retail store with a login bolted on.
First question we will ask: how does a dealer find out your price today? The answer usually explains the whole project.
Sharma Traders, Bhosari CREDIT AVAILABLE
₹1,15,800
A B2B order is not a retail order with a discount
Every one of these is normal in your business and unusual on a retail platform. Together they are why a themed store with a login page does not survive contact with your dealers.
Nobody pays list price
Each dealer has a negotiated rate, sometimes per product, sometimes per category, often unchanged since a handshake in 2019.
Price moves with quantity
Slab pricing, minimum order quantities and box or pallet multiples. Ordering 490 pieces when the slab starts at 500 needs handling.
Nobody pays at checkout
Orders go against a credit limit with 30 or 60 day terms. The portal has to know what is outstanding before it accepts an order.
Half the orders start as quotations
A dealer asks, an engineer prices it, someone approves it, and only then does it become an order. That is a workflow, not a cart.
Prices must stay private
No dealer should ever see another dealer's rate, and none of it should be visible to the public or indexed by Google.
The ERP already owns the truth
Stock, rates and outstanding balances live in your ERP or Tally. A portal that duplicates them creates two versions of reality.
See how a dealer price gets calculated
This is a working demonstration of the logic we build, using a made-up product. Change the dealer and the quantity, and watch the rate, the minimum order rule and the credit check respond.
- List price
- ₹480.00
- Dealer rate
- ₹422.40
- Your rate per piece
- ₹422.40
- Order value for 25 pieces
- ₹10,560
The portal blocks this at the line, before checkout, and tells the dealer the minimum is 50 rather than failing silently.
Six parts of a working dealer portal
Not all six are needed on day one. We usually launch with ordering and pricing, then add quotations and deeper ERP work once dealers are using it.
Accounts and access
Who can log in, what they can see, and who signs off a new dealer before they get a login.
- Dealer registration with approval
- Multiple users under one dealer account
- Roles for owner, purchase and accounts
- Nothing visible before login
Pricing engine
The heart of the project. Every rule you currently keep in a spreadsheet or someone's head.
- Price lists per dealer or per group
- Slab pricing and quantity breaks
- MOQ and pack-size multiples
- Scheme discounts with expiry dates
Ordering built for volume
Your dealers order forty lines at a time. A retail cart with one product per page wastes their afternoon.
- Grid ordering with quantity boxes
- Order by part number or paste a list
- Repeat a previous order in one tap
- Saved templates for regular purchases
Credit and payment terms
The dealer sees their position before ordering, which removes most of the calls your accounts team takes.
- Credit limit and outstanding balance
- Ageing and overdue invoices
- Rules for what happens over limit
- Online payment where you want it
Quotations and approvals
For non-standard orders, project pricing and anything your sales engineers need to price by hand.
- Request for quotation from the catalogue
- Engineer prices and sends it back
- Approval steps above a value threshold
- Accepted quote converts to an order
ERP and Tally integration
Without this the portal is a nicer way to collect orders that someone still types in by hand.
- Stock and price read from the ERP
- Orders pushed back automatically
- Invoices and dispatch status returned
- Outstanding balances kept current
GST invoices, payment gateway, order alerts on WhatsApp, separate rates for retail and wholesale buyers, all set up and explained in plain language.
The rules workshop comes before the build
On B2B projects, agreeing the rules takes longer than writing the code. We front-load that deliberately, because a pricing rule discovered in month three is the expensive kind.
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Rules workshop
We sit with your sales team and write down every pricing, MOQ, credit and approval rule as it works today, including the exceptions.
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Signed rule document
You approve that document before development starts. It becomes the specification and the test plan at the same time.
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ERP access and test data
We confirm what your ERP or Tally can expose, and get a test environment. This often decides the timeline more than the build does.
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Build and demo weekly
Pricing engine first, because everything else depends on it. You see it working on staging every week.
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Pilot with real dealers
Three or four friendly dealers go first, with their real rates and real orders. Their feedback is worth more than any internal review.
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Rollout and adoption
A short guide in the language your dealers use, training for your sales team, and a plan for the ones who still want to phone.
The portal only works if dealers actually use it
This is where most B2B portals quietly fail. The software works, and six months later eighty percent of orders still arrive by phone because nothing changed for the people placing them.
A dealer will switch when the portal is genuinely faster than calling your office. That is a design problem before it is a training problem.
One thing we insist on: your sales engineers get the same view of a dealer's account as the dealer does. Otherwise they cannot answer questions, and they will quietly tell dealers to keep phoning.
It has to work on a phone, in a godown
Your dealer is standing in a warehouse on patchy 4G, not sitting at a desk. Big tap targets and a page that loads.
Repeat order is the killer feature
Most dealers order roughly the same things every month. One tap to repeat and adjust beats any phone call.
Order updates on WhatsApp
Confirmation, dispatch and invoice where they already read messages, rather than an email nobody opens.
Start with dealers who want it
A pilot with your three most organised dealers builds proof. The reluctant ones follow once it is clearly working.
What you actually receive at handover
On a B2B project the documentation matters as much as the code, because the rules encoded in it are your commercial policy.
The signed rules document
Every pricing, MOQ, credit and approval rule as agreed in the workshop. It doubles as the test plan.
Source code and database
In your organisation’s repository from day one, with the schema documented.
ERP integration documentation
Endpoints, field mappings, sync frequency, and exactly what happens when the ERP is unreachable.
A dealer onboarding pack
A short guide in the language your dealers actually use, plus the message to send when you invite them.
Sales team training
Your engineers get the same account view a dealer sees, so they can answer questions instead of deflecting them.
Test accounts and sample data
Log in as a dealer on a test tier and check the pricing rules yourself, whenever you want to.
We also agree who owns rule changes after launch. Dealer rates move, and a portal nobody can update becomes a portal nobody trusts.
What manufacturers ask us first
Anything else, ask on WhatsApp. You will get a straight answer from someone who has built this before.
Can this run on Shopify or WooCommerce?
Sometimes. WooCommerce with custom pricing and role logic handles a moderate set of rules well, and we build that where it fits. Shopify can be bent into simple B2B but the workarounds get expensive. Once dealer-specific price lists, slab rules, credit limits and a two-way ERP sync are all in play, a custom build usually costs less over three years than fighting a retail platform. We will tell you honestly which side of that line you are on.
Our pricing rules are complicated and partly undocumented. Is that a problem?
It is completely normal, and it is exactly what the rules workshop is for. Most of our clients discover during that session that two people in the same office apply a rule differently. Better to find that out on a whiteboard than in production. Bring your rate sheets, your last hundred invoices and the person who knows the exceptions.
Will it work with our ERP?
The honest answer is that it depends on what your ERP will expose. Some have a clean API, some need a middleware layer, and some only offer scheduled file exchanges. All three can work, but they produce different timelines and different costs. We check this early, before scoping the rest, because it is the single most common cause of a B2B project slipping.
Can we sell to the public on the same site?
Yes, and many manufacturers do. A public catalogue with enquiry forms and no prices, plus a login that reveals dealer rates and ordering. The important part is making sure dealer pricing can never leak into the public view or into a search engine, which we handle at the template and the robots level rather than hoping nobody guesses a URL.
What if our dealers are not comfortable with technology?
They are more comfortable than people assume. Every one of them already orders on Amazon and sends payments on UPI. What they will not tolerate is a portal that is slower than phoning you. We design for a phone first, keep repeat ordering to one tap, and pilot with a few dealers before rollout. Phone orders never disappear entirely, and they should not have to.
How long does a dealer portal take?
Longer than a retail store, and the variable is rarely the code. Rules agreement and ERP access set the pace. We give a timeline after the rules workshop rather than before it, because a number quoted before we understand your pricing would be a guess dressed up as a commitment.
How does a dealer find out your price today?
Tell us that, and roughly how many dealers you have. It tells us more about the project than a feature list would.
hello@ecommercepune.in
We will come back with questions about your pricing rules and what your ERP can expose, then suggest whether this is a WooCommerce or a custom build. If it is urgent, call or WhatsApp +91 88620 92781 .