What does the Cin7 Core B2B portal actually do?
Cin7 describes it plainly: “Cin7 Core’s B2B eCommerce Portal enables your customers to browse and order from your catalog 24/7.” Under that sentence there is more capability than most people expect from a module bundled with an inventory system, and it is worth listing before anyone tells you it is a toy.
The important structural point is that all of this runs off Cin7 Core records directly. There is no connector, no sync schedule and no second copy of your catalogue to keep true. For a wholesaler, that removes the entire category of problem this Library mostly exists to document.
Catalogue browsing with list view and, for product variants, a matrix view, plus a Quick View for simple products.
Quick order by CSV upload of product codes and quantities straight into the cart, which is how experienced trade buyers prefer to order.
Bulk order across a product family, so a buyer enters sizes and colours in one grid.
Reorder from history: tick previous orders and click Reorder to copy the lines.
Order history showing payment and fulfilment status, carrier and tracking number, with invoice download as PDF or by email.
Backorders and out-of-stock ordering through the Allow Backorders setting, with three stock display choices: Hide, In/out of stock, or Show Quantity.
Sales rep ordering. A rep logs in, selects an active customer, and places the order on their behalf.
A minimum order value, a nominated sales representative on portal orders, tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive display, RMA return requests, and gift card redemption at checkout.
A custom domain, pointed with a CNAME record and an SSL certificate you supply.
Checked against: Cin7 Core: Set up B2B Portal, Cin7 Core: Using the B2B Portal, Cin7 Core: B2B portal settings
Is the Cin7 Core B2B portal free?
No, and this trips people up because the portal is often described as “built in”. Cin7’s setup article states that the “B2B portal requires an add-on to your base subscription per portal”. Per portal is the part to read twice. The same article says “You may have several portals for different customers, each with different lists of products to sell”, and each of those needs its own licence.
Several portals is a genuinely useful design if you sell into distinct trade segments with different catalogues, because it gives you catalogue separation without building entitlement rules. It is also a cost that scales with segments rather than with revenue, so five portals is five add-ons.
One warning from the same article, worth pinning to the wall before anyone tidies up your Cin7 settings: removing a store “will completely delete ALL sales history and portal settings”.
Checked against: Cin7 Core: Set up B2B Portal
Where does the Cin7 Core B2B portal stop?
Two kinds of limit appear below and they carry different weight. A quoted limit is Cin7 telling you the boundary. An undocumented area is us saying the help centre does not cover it, which is a reason to test rather than a proof of absence. We have kept them apart on purpose.
| Criterion | What Cin7’s documentation says | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Public discovery | Guest access lets “anyone, even uninvited customers, access the portal’s Home page”, but “only customers who have been invited and accepted their invitation can log in to the portal and place orders”, and “users must be logged in before they can download prices, place an order, or view existing orders”. | The portal serves customers you already have. It is not a channel for winning new ones, and no amount of settings work will make it one. |
| Product images | “Only 10 images can be shown per product.” | Fine for a fastener. Tight for anything sold on appearance, and a hard stop if your catalogue leans on detail photography. |
| Buyers inside one customerUndocumented, not disproven. This is the single most common reason a portal gets rejected in a Celeste diagnostic, so it is worth an hour of your time. | Invited customers and sales reps each get an activation link and set a password. The settings and access articles do not describe roles or permissions for several buyers inside one customer account. | If your customer needs a clerk who raises orders and a manager who approves them, the documentation does not say the portal models that. Test it with a real customer before you promise it. |
| Currency and region pricing | The B2B portal settings article covers price tiers, tax display, minimum order value, stock display and payment methods. It does not mention currency or region-specific pricing. | If you sell into more than one currency, do not assume the portal handles it. Ask Cin7 directly and get the answer in writing. |
| Pricing granularity | Guests see a price tier you nominate, or no prices at all. Cin7 Core itself supports custom prices per customer, which “take precedence over regular product prices set by price tiers”. | Tier pricing in the portal is well covered. Whether a per-customer custom price renders for that customer in the portal is not spelled out in the settings article, so prove it with a real account. |
| Payment and terms | Cash on delivery, customer credit, money transfer, purchase order, Cin7 Pay, PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, QuickBooks Payments and Pinch, each conditional on the integration being active. Customer credit requires “Create sale as: Authorized invoice”. | Buying on account and paying by purchase order are both covered, which is more than several consumer platforms manage without an app. |
| Content and marketing | The portal offers a home page, catalogue navigation and product content. Cin7 says of its Omni sibling that the B2B site is built “for wholesale sales in particular, so you may find some of the B2C functionality you would expect missing from it”. | This is an ordering tool with a front door, not a website. If the site has to sell as well as take orders, you need something else in front of it. |
| Custom domain | “It is possible to point a B2B portal to your own custom domain name”, using a registrar-purchased domain, a CNAME entry and an SSL certificate. | Credit where it is due. Your buyers see your domain, not a vendor subdomain, which removes the most common objection to a bundled portal. |
Checked against: Cin7 Core: B2B portal settings, Cin7 Core: Access B2B portal as a customer, guest, or sales rep, Cin7 Core: How can I use different prices for a customer, Cin7 Omni: Install a B2B online store
Who is the Cin7 Core B2B portal genuinely enough for?
We sell commerce projects and we would still tell a lot of companies to stay on the portal. It is the cheapest thing you can do that actually removes phone and email order entry, and removing that is most of the benefit a first B2B channel delivers. If you match the profile below, buy the add-on, run it for a year, and spend the project money somewhere it earns more.
The tell is whether your buyers arrive knowing what they want. A portal serves a known buyer with a known catalogue beautifully. It has nothing to offer a buyer who is still deciding.
Your customers are all existing accounts, invited by you, and you are not trying to win new ones through the site.
Your pricing fits inside Cin7 Core price tiers, or the customers who need something else are happy to keep phoning.
One person per customer places the orders, so nobody needs an approval step inside the buying organisation.
Your catalogue is functional rather than visual, and 10 images per product is more than you use today.
You sell in one currency, into one tax regime, from one Cin7 Core setup.
You want this live in weeks, from your own team, with no integration to maintain afterwards.
Checked against: Cin7 Core: B2B portal settings, Cin7 Core: Pricing and price tiers
When does the Cin7 Core B2B portal stop being enough?
These are the triggers we see. Any one of them on its own is usually survivable. Two together is where the workarounds start costing more than the platform would have.
Note the pattern in that list. Almost every trigger is about someone other than the buyer you already know: a new customer, a second person at an existing customer, a customer in another currency, or a procurement system that will not visit your site at all.
Search traffic matters, because a real share of your new accounts should be finding you rather than being invited.
A customer’s procurement team asks for Punchout is a way for a buyer to shop on a supplier’s website from inside their own procurement system. The buyer clicks out, builds a cart, and the cart is returned to their system as a requisition for approval. into Ariba, Coupa or SAP, which neither Cin7 help centre documents.
Buyers inside one customer need different rights, which is the A company account is a customer record that holds several people, each with their own login and their own permissions. One buyer might place orders, another might only approve them, a third might only look up past invoices. model and the thing consumer-shaped tools model worst.
You need Quote to order is the process where a buyer asks for a price, a person or a system prepares a quote, and the accepted quote becomes an order. In much of B2B it is the normal way to buy, not an exception. as a first-class flow rather than an emailed price, because a meaningful share of revenue starts as a request rather than an add-to-cart.
You are selling direct to consumers as well, and running two catalogues in two places has started producing two answers.
Marketing needs landing pages, technical content and campaign tracking on the same domain as the ordering experience.
Checked against: Cin7 Core: Access B2B portal as a customer, guest, or sales rep, Cin7 Omni: Install a B2B online store
How do you test the Cin7 Core portal against a storefront in one afternoon?
Run this with a real customer record and a real buyer, not a demo account. Every step below is designed to fail fast if the portal is wrong for you, which is the outcome you want on a Tuesday afternoon rather than in month four of a build.
Pick your most awkward account: the one with the negotiated prices, the two buyers and the approval step. Set them up in the portal exactly as they buy today.
Give one of their buyers a login and ask them to place a real order without training. Watch where they stop.
Check whether that customer’s custom price, not their tier price, is the number on the screen. If it is the tier price, you have found your answer already.
Ask the same customer’s buyer to find a product they have never bought before. Discovery is where portals and storefronts separate.
Count the images you would want on your top 20 products. If the answer is above 10 on any of them, the ceiling is real for you.
Price the add-on per portal against the number of trade segments you would want to separate, and compare that to a platform licence over three years rather than one.
Checked against: Cin7 Core: Using the B2B Portal, Cin7 Core: Set up B2B Portal
The wider picture
This page answers one narrow question. Acro Commerce covers the strategy around it.
Common questions
- Does the Cin7 Core B2B portal cost extra?
- Yes. Cin7’s setup article states that the B2B portal “requires an add-on to your base subscription per portal”, so it is not included in the base Cin7 Core subscription and each additional portal is licensed separately. Since Cin7 supports several portals with different product lists for different customers, a seller with three trade segments is looking at three add-ons rather than one.
- Can several buyers at the same customer have their own logins to the Cin7 Core B2B portal?
- Cin7’s access article describes invited customers and sales reps each receiving an activation link and setting a password, and it does not describe roles or permissions for multiple buyers inside a single customer account. That is an absence in the documentation rather than a tested limit, so test it with a real customer before you rely on it. If a buying clerk and an approving manager both need distinct rights, treat this as the question that decides whether you stay on the portal.
- Can Google find products in a Cin7 Core B2B portal?
- The portal is built around invitation. Guests can reach the home page and browse the catalogue if you enable guest access, but Cin7 states that users must be logged in before they can download prices, place an order or view existing orders. We have not tested how portal pages behave in search indexes, so if organic discovery is part of the business case, treat that as unproven and check it on a live portal rather than assuming either answer.
- Can we run the Cin7 Core B2B portal and a Shopify store at the same time?
- Yes, and it is a common shape: the portal serves invited trade accounts while Shopify serves direct-to-consumer or open trade. Cin7 Core pushes stock to Shopify and never pulls it back, and you can link several Shopify stores to one Cin7 Core account, each with its own catalogue and settings. The thing to design deliberately is which channel owns which customer, because a trade buyer who finds the Shopify price will ask why it differs from the portal price.
- What happens to our order history if we turn the portal off?
- Cin7’s setup article warns that removing a store “will completely delete ALL sales history and portal settings”. Sales orders themselves live in Cin7 Core, but the portal-side history and configuration do not survive removing the store. Export anything you care about, and do not let a tidy-up of unused stores happen without someone reading that sentence first.
Last updated 2026-08-20. Facts on this page last checked against source 2026-08-20.