Why 90% of Your Customers Still Aren't Using Your B2B Portal
Read Time 13 mins | Jul 23, 2026 10:30:00 AM
I'm willing to bet your B2B portal has adoption in the single digits.
The first thing most businesses miss is that B2B ecommerce isn't about products. It's about people. More specifically, buyer personas. Your customers don't want access to your website. They want access to their business. Every interaction should feel personal, familiar and useful.
Your customers do not want access to your website.
That means when they log in, everything should feel like it was built just for them:
- Their negotiated pricing and special agreements.
- Their products, not your entire catalogue.
- Their order history, invoices and account balance.
- Quick reordering, quote building and quote sharing.
- Budgets, approvals and permissions that match their organisation.
If your portal only gets visited when someone needs to place an order, you've already lost. The account area should become the first place customers go whenever they need anything. Download invoices. Check balances. Raise quotes. Approve purchases. Buying is just one reason to visit.
The second thing businesses overlook is the internal team. Every successful B2B ecommerce project has two sets of users: your customers and your employees. Ignore either one and adoption stalls. Most established businesses have sales, customer service and finance teams who've been working the same way for years. If ecommerce creates more work, they'll naturally resist it. If they think it's replacing them, they'll actively avoid it.
Live in a Month:
The Rapid Rollout of Liberty Workwear's B2B Ecommerce Portal
Liberty Workwear, a trusted supplier of PPE and branded workwear, needed a digital solution that could support the rapid expansion of their B2B customer base. Their previous platform only functioned for a handful of accounts, offered no ERP integration, and required every order to be manually uploaded via CSV. Partnering with Symphony Commerce, Liberty went live in under a month with a fully integrated, scalable B2B portal built to grow with the business.
Instead, design the platform around your admin personas as well:
- Fit into existing processes rather than replacing them overnight.
- Identify every internal touchpoint and remove unnecessary effort.
- Give sales teams tools they actually want to use, such as quote building, assisted ordering and customer visibility.
- Make ecommerce part of the sales process, not the competition.
Of course, the future won't be about forcing every customer into a portal. The best digital strategies will meet buyers where they already are. Some customers will always love self-service. Others will continue sending purchase orders by email because that's how they've bought for the last twenty years. The goal isn't to change their behaviour overnight. The goal is to digitise the transaction, regardless of how it arrives.
That's exactly why I'm excited about where AI is taking B2B ecommerce. Imagine emailed purchase orders being interpreted, validated and processed automatically through your ecommerce platform, without the customer changing a thing. The buying habit stays the same. The business becomes digital. Less manual processing. Better data. Faster fulfilment. Higher adoption. I think that's where the next generation of B2B ecommerce will be won.
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What Our Clients Are Saying
"We’ve gone from a single online store to a multi‑region operation with real‑time data sync and automated order handling thanks to Symphony’s Tempus platform. It’s the technology that keeps everything connected across our UK and Irish sites, ensuring consistency, control, and confidence as we grow. Symphony Commerce has given us the foundation to keep scaling without limits."
Gary Conaughty
Founder at GSC Computers
