A trade customer ordering portal that costs nothing per customer.
Staff users count against your plan. Buyers and suppliers do not — the product enforces that in code, not in a footnote.
- Unlimited portal accounts — buyers and suppliers never take a staff seat, on every plan including Launch.
- Their prices, not your list prices — buyer-specific pricing with contract-price labels, stock watches and reorder from a past order.
- A cart built for wholesale — bulk add, ship-to address selection, saved lists you can add wholesale to the cart, and safe concurrent editing.
- Requests, never confirmed orders — checkout raises a quote request or a draft order, and your team approves it before anything is committed.
- Self-serve account and spend — what is owed, credit held, an aged breakdown, settlement discounts for early payment, and a 12-month net-invoiced trend with year-to-date versus last year.
- Standing orders and returns — buyers pause, resume or run standing orders themselves, and raise their own returns with label and tracking links and credit-note references.
Buyers, suppliers and the public, each with their own front door.
Same data, three audiences, three sets of rules about what they are allowed to see.
On every plan. Contract pricing, cart and checkout, quotes to accept or decline, orders, invoices, documents, returns, standing orders, request tracking and notification preferences. On Scale, a buyer administrator invites their own colleagues and sets each one an approval threshold.
On every plan. Home tiles for orders awaiting confirmation, RFQs awaiting a quote and open invoices. Suppliers confirm or reject a purchase order with their own reference, price RFQ lines or decline to quote, and submit invoices. Compliance documents with expiry tracking are Premier.
On Growth. Publish per product with editable slugs, choose from three price-visibility modes and four stock-display modes, take guest enquiries through a basket repriced on the server, accept trade-account applications, and read the analytics — including which searches returned nothing.
Requests and drafts, never confirmed orders.
A portal should reduce your admin, not your authority.
Portal checkout deliberately does not create a confirmed order. Whatever a buyer builds arrives as a quote request or a draft order, and someone on your team approves it before stock is committed or an invoice exists. That is the point: pricing, credit and stock allocation stay decisions you make, so opening a portal to two hundred customers does not hand two hundred people the ability to commit your inventory at three in the morning. Requests land in the same sales order queue your team already works, and flow on through quote to cash exactly as a phoned-in order would.
Nor do buyers see what you paid. Cost price, margin, price source and the reasons behind a price override are staff-only fields, and the product carries a dedicated test whose only job is to assert that none of them ever appear in any buyer-facing response. Stock cover is refused on the same principle: a buyer who learns how thin your cover is has just been handed a negotiating position. They see their price and their contract label — not how you arrived at either. It is the same discipline that runs through the rest of the wholesale ERP.
Frequently asked questions.
What is a B2B customer portal?
It is a signed-in area where your trade customers see their own agreed pricing, order history, invoices and account balance, and build an order themselves instead of emailing or phoning it through. In Cobalt the portal runs on the same data as your sales, stock and invoicing, so there is nothing to sync and nothing to reconcile.
Do portal users count towards my plan's user limit?
No. Portal accounts are unlimited on every plan and never consume a staff seat. Only your own staff users count against the plan, so inviting a hundred customers and fifty suppliers does not change your bill.
Can customers see my cost price or margin?
No. Cost price, margin, price source and price-override reasons are staff-only, and the product has a dedicated test asserting that none of them ever appear in a buyer-facing response. Buyers also never see stock cover figures — that is a deliberate refusal, not an oversight.
Can buyers place a confirmed order directly?
No, and that is by design. Portal checkout creates a quote request or a draft order, never a confirmed one, so your team approves pricing, credit and stock before anything is committed. Buyers can also accept or decline a quote you have sent them, which is the one place they move a document forward on their own.
Is there a supplier portal as well?
Yes, on every plan. Suppliers get home tiles for orders awaiting confirmation, RFQs awaiting a quote and open invoices. They confirm or reject a purchase order with their own reference, price RFQ lines or decline to quote, and submit invoices and see payments. Compliance-document upload with expiry tracking is on Premier.
Which plan do I need for the portal and storefront?
The buyer portal, the supplier portal and unlimited portal accounts are on every plan, including Launch. The public B2B storefront needs Growth. Buyer-side team management with per-member approval thresholds needs Scale. Supplier compliance documents need Premier.
Related pages.
Let your customers do the typing.
A buyer portal, a supplier portal and a trade storefront — with unlimited accounts and no per-seat charge.
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