B2B Commerce or dealer portal: when a shop pays off

A manufacturer needs Salesforce B2B Commerce instead of a portal when dealers and customers reorder known items in volume: spare parts, consumables, accessories. A portal on Experience Cloud or Manufacturing Cloud shows agreements, orders and cases and takes requests. A B2B store adds what repeat buying needs: a catalogue, visibility per buyer group, buyer prices, a cart and a checkout. The buyer licence is the same family in both cases. The difference in cost is the commerce fee and the implementation. My rule of thumb: if dealers send you order lists every week, build a store. If they call twice a year about a machine, a portal is enough.

What does a portal do, and what does a store add?

A portal is an Experience Cloud site where external users see their own records and act on them. In Manufacturing Cloud customer portal: what to show I describe a portal where customers saw sales agreements, orders, master data and cases, and could request products and prices or place orders. That covers “show me” and “please do this for me”.

Salesforce B2B Commerce covers “let me buy this myself”. According to Salesforce Help1, merchants launch a store from a template in Experience Builder and define search, carts and checkouts for business customers. The data model behind it, as Trailhead2 describes it:

• Buyer accounts are normal Salesforce accounts whose contacts are enabled as buyers.
• Buyer groups bundle similar buyer accounts, for example all premium dealers in one country.
• Entitlement policies define which products a buyer group can see.
• Price books set the prices a buyer group gets.

On top of that come the cart, the checkout and the order summary that the buyer sees in the order history. Salesforce now also markets the product as “Agentforce Commerce for B2B”, according to Trailhead3. Help and the pricing page still use the older names.

	Portal (Experience Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud)	Salesforce B2B Commerce
Typical use	View records, request, report a case	Search, select, order, reorder
Products	Shown on records, no catalogue	Catalogue with search and filters
Who sees what	Sharing rules on records	Entitlement policies per buyer group
Prices	Shown if someone maintains them on records	Price books per buyer group, calculated in the cart
Ordering	Form or order record	Cart and checkout
Extra fee	None beyond licences	Share of the store’s revenue

Buyers need Customer Community Plus, as in a portal

Here the two options are closer than many expect. Salesforce describes the personas and permissions for a B2B store like this: buyers and buyer managers use a Customer Community Plus licence. Buyers get the permission B2B Commerce User, buyer managers B2B Commerce Super User plus Delegated External User Administration, so they can look after the buyers of their own company. Merchandisers who maintain the store internally need the “B2B and D2C Commerce” licence.

Customer Community Plus is also the licence family for a customer portal. The list prices on the Experience Cloud for Manufacturing price list4, billed annually:

$35

Customer Community Plus per member per month

$15

Customer Community Plus per login per month

$50

Partner Community per member per month

$20

Partner Community per login per month

So the buyer licence does not decide between portal and store. The difference is the commerce fee, which Salesforce charges as a share of the revenue through the store, and the effort to build catalogue, prices and ERP calls. I cover the fee in B2B Commerce pricing: what the GMV model costs. How portal licences compare to internal ones is in Salesforce licences: does everyone need a full one?.

When does a shop pay off?

I look at four numbers before anyone talks about store templates:

1. Repeat orders of known part numbers. A store is strong when the buyer knows what they want: the filter they ordered last quarter, the wear part from the parts list. The more orders refer to a part number, the more a catalogue helps.
2. Order lines per year. Every line typed in by inside sales costs time and carries a risk of error. A few hundred lines a year do not justify a store. Tens of thousands usually do.
3. Number of ordering dealers and customers. With five large customers on EDI, a store adds little. With hundreds of small dealers ordering by email, it adds a lot.
4. Share of phone and email orders. This is the volume a store can actually move. Orders already coming through EDI stay there.

If you cannot get these numbers from the ERP within a week, I would collect them before any further step. They are also the basis for the business case for a B2B webshop.

Worked example: 250 dealers, 30,000 order lines a year

Assume a manufacturer of compressors sells through 250 dealers in Europe. The dealers order about 30,000 spare parts order lines a year, mostly by email with a part number list, some by phone. Inside sales enters each line in SAP. Dealers already use a portal for warranty cases.

That is about 120 lines per dealer and year, roughly ten a month. The dealers know their part numbers, they reorder the same wear parts, and they would order outside office hours if they could. Here I would build a store and keep the portal for cases. The B2B Commerce section of Salesforce Help1 has a guide for adding a B2B store to an existing Experience Cloud site, so portal and store can run on one site.

Change one assumption: the same manufacturer has 20 dealers who order complete compressors twice a year, each with a different configuration. Then a store adds nothing. The dealer needs a quote, and the portal shows its status.

Where is a portal enough?

A portal is the better answer in these cases:

• Configured machines. A machine with options, a layout drawing and a delivery date that sales has to confirm belongs in a quote process. A store sells what a buyer can order without a conversation.
• Few orders, many questions. If dealers mainly ask for status, documents or warranty, a portal with cases, orders and assets does the job.
• Ordering already runs through EDI. Large customers who send orders from their own ERP will not switch to clicking in a store.

And sometimes Salesforce is not the answer at all. If the company has no Salesforce CRM, the store brings the whole platform with it. If the ERP vendor’s own commerce module already covers your prices and stock, check that first. With a very small catalogue and few dealers, a simple ordering form is cheaper than any shop system.

First step: four numbers from twelve months of orders

Pull the four numbers for the last twelve months: order lines, share referring to a part number, ordering dealers, share by phone and email. If they point to a store, the next questions are who owns prices and stock, which buyer groups you need and which ERP calls must be live. They are in the masterclass chapter on whether B2B Commerce is worth it. An independent view of make or buy is part of my work on make-or-buy and licence forecasts.

Sources4

1. 1Salesforce Help (opens in a new tab)help.salesforce.com
2. 2Trailhead (opens in a new tab)trailhead.salesforce.com
3. 3Trailhead (opens in a new tab)trailhead.salesforce.com
4. 4Experience Cloud for Manufacturing price list (opens in a new tab)salesforce.com