"E-commerce for B2B" and "a private buyer portal" sound similar but solve different problems. For most welding and industrial distributors, the distinction determines whether the software actually fits how the business sells.
An e-commerce store assumes an open storefront: one public catalog, one price list, and checkout available to anyone. That model fits retail and many direct-to-consumer businesses well. It does not fit a welding supply distributor whose pricing is negotiated per account and whose catalog should not be visible to competitors or the general public.
A buyer portal assumes the opposite: private access per account, a catalog scoped to what each buyer is approved to purchase, and pricing that reflects an existing negotiated relationship rather than a public price. Buyers log in to their own portal, not a shared storefront, and see only their assigned products and pricing.
The difference shows up clearly in three areas: pricing (public list price vs. per-buyer negotiated rate), catalog access (open to all visitors vs. restricted per account), and order terms (immediate checkout vs. PO number and Net 30 invoicing). Distributors who adopt e-commerce platforms built for public storefronts typically end up working around these gaps with manual pricing overrides or a second system entirely.
If your pricing is the same for every customer and anyone should be able to buy from you online, an e-commerce store is the right tool. If your buyers are known accounts with negotiated pricing, restricted catalogs, and invoicing terms, a private buyer portal built for distributors is the closer fit.
Read why SupplyDesk was built specifically for welding distributors →
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