Pricing guide
Customer portal pricing and the ROI behind it
Every "could you resend that invoice?" phone call is an argument for a portal.
Spend one week counting the calls and emails that land on your sales and invoicing people: "what is my price for product X?", "where is my order?", "resend me the March invoices". At a typical B2B distributor, 30–50% of these interactions require no human judgement whatsoever — only access to information already sitting in the company's systems. That is exactly what a customer portal sells: each client gets an account holding their orders, invoices, documents and tickets, available without phoning anyone. For 2026, the going rates: a basic build — authentication, order history, invoice and document downloads, a ticket form — costs €8,000–20,000. The complete version, with ordering at each client's individually negotiated prices, online payments and two-way integration with your ERP or CRM, climbs to €20,000–40,000. The attractive part of this investment, and one reason it travels well as a nearshore project for companies across Europe: unlike much custom software, the return is directly measurable — in staff hours released and in repeat orders that no longer pass through anyone's inbox.
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Key takeaways
Basic portal: €8,000–20,000
Client accounts, order history, invoice and certificate downloads, support tickets with visible status. Removes the biggest slice of repetitive email and phone traffic.
Portal with ordering and payments: €20,000–40,000
Clients order directly at their negotiated prices, see available stock, pay online or on payment terms. ERP integration carries the order into your system without any retyping.
ERP/CRM integration: €4,000–12,000 of the total
Synchronising stock, per-client pricing and invoices between portal and internal system. The component with the widest price variance — it depends directly on how friendly your ERP's API is.
A concrete case: a B2B distributor with 200 active clients
Starting point: a distributor of technical materials, 200 active clients, 3 people on order intake and invoicing. Orders arrive by email and phone, each retyped into the ERP, while invoice-resend requests and delivery-status questions consume — measured — about 25 hours of team time per week. The portal delivered: online ordering at each client's individual prices, real-time stock visibility, downloadable invoices, integration with the existing ERP. Indicative cost: €28,000, of which the ERP integration accounted for €8,000.
The result after one year, with conservative numbers: 60% of orders enter through the portal with no human touch, retyping and its errors vanish for those orders, and the 25 weekly hours of repetitive requests fall to about 8. At a fully loaded staff cost of €12/hour, the released hours alone are worth around €10,000 a year — payback in under three years, before counting the increased repeat business (a client who can order in 3 minutes at 9 pm orders more often) and the improved payment discipline that comes from a permanently visible balance. Your calculation will differ, but its structure will not: repetitive hours × hourly cost, plus extra revenue from order frequency.
Frequently asked questions
My company has 30 clients, not 200 — is a portal still worth it?
Usually not at full-investment level: below 50–100 active clients, request volume rarely justifies €8,000–20,000. The honest alternative is a shared per-client document space, or the portal module already bundled with some ERP and invoicing systems — nearly free, and it covers 70% of the need.
What if my ERP has no API to integrate with?
Fallback options exist, each with compromises: scheduled file exchange (stock and prices exported at fixed intervals, orders imported manually or semi-automatically) or direct database access where feasible. It works, but data stops being real-time — and if the ERP is already at its limits, the more honest conversation is about replacing it first.
My B2B clients are used to the phone — will they actually use it?
Adoption is built, not hoped for: day-one access with real data, one benefit exclusive to the portal (delivery status, instant invoices), and sales reps opening it together with the client at the first order. Companies that treat the launch as an internal change project typically reach 50–70% of orders through the portal within the first year.
Is a customer portal the same thing as an online shop?
They look similar on the surface but serve different jobs: an online shop sells to anyone at public prices with immediate payment; a portal serves existing clients with contracts, individually negotiated prices, payment terms and shared history. That is why a portal must integrate with the ERP, while a shop can live apart from it.
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Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247