Your customers browse your catalog, see their pricing, check stock availability, and place orders online — with every order flowing directly into your ERP.
The Ask the Ledger B2B web portal is not a separate ecommerce system that syncs with your ERP overnight. It reads directly from your ERP data in real time. When a customer logs in, they see their pricing, their product catalog, and your current inventory levels — not a cached copy from last night's export. When they place an order, it appears in your sales order queue immediately, ready for approval and fulfillment.
This architecture eliminates the reconciliation problems that plague most B2B ecommerce setups. There is no sync to break, no price discrepancy to investigate, no inventory mismatch to reconcile. The portal is a window into the same data your office team uses every day.
When a customer logs into the portal, they land on a dashboard that shows their account at a glance: recent orders, open invoices, and quick reorder options. From there they can browse your product catalog filtered to show only items they are authorized to purchase, with their negotiated pricing displayed — not your list price, not a generic wholesale price, but the specific price that applies to their account based on their price tier, any active exceptions, and volume break levels.
Each product page shows the item description, available stock quantity, unit of measure, and the customer's price. If stock is low or unavailable, the portal shows that clearly so the customer can adjust their order before submitting rather than finding out after the fact.
Customers add items to a cart and submit the order. The order flows into Ask the Ledger as a sales order in a pending/approval state. Your office team reviews incoming web orders the same way they handle phone or email orders — in the sales order queue. They can approve and process immediately, adjust quantities or pricing if needed, or contact the customer if something needs clarification.
For repeat orders (which are the majority in B2B), customers can reorder from their order history with one click. They can also maintain a favorites list of their most-ordered items for even faster reordering. This is the functionality B2B buyers actually use — not browsing and discovery, but fast, accurate repetition of known purchases.
The portal queries the ERP's pricing engine live. When a customer views a product, the system resolves their price through the same logic that the office team uses: check the customer's price tier (A through E), check for any customer-specific price exceptions, apply volume breaks if the quantity qualifies, and display the result. If a customer's pricing changes in the ERP, the portal reflects it immediately — no export, no sync delay.
Inventory availability works the same way. The portal reads from the live inventory database. If a large wholesale order ships at 10 AM and reduces stock, a customer checking the portal at 10:01 AM sees the updated availability. This prevents the most common B2B portal complaint: ordering items that turn out to be unavailable because the portal was showing yesterday's stock levels.
Beyond ordering, the portal gives customers access to their account information without calling your office. They can view their open invoices and payment history, check the status of pending orders, and review past orders for reference or reorder. This reduces inbound phone calls and emails for routine account inquiries, freeing your team to focus on higher-value customer service work.
The B2B portal is most valuable for distributors whose customers order regularly and value convenience. Specific use cases include:
Web portal orders flow into the same workflow as all other orders. They appear in the sales order queue, go through the same approval process, get picked and shipped using the same warehouse workflows, and get invoiced through the same billing process. Route delivery, recurring billing, and AR all work identically regardless of whether the order came from a phone call, the office counter, or the web portal.
For a broader view of B2B ecommerce strategy for distributors, see B2B Ecommerce for Wholesale Distributors. For the full feature set, see Features.