Which orders are you losing?
This is the whole diagnosis, and it takes an afternoon with your sales history rather than a project.
Pull twelve months of orders for the accounts you believe are drifting. For each account, split the lines into two piles. Pile one is items that account has bought from you more than twice before. Pile two is everything else. Now compare this year to last year, pile by pile.
If pile one has shrunk and pile two hasn’t, you’re losing repeat business, and repeat business goes to whoever is easiest. That’s a self-service problem and it responds to a portal.
If pile two has shrunk and pile one hasn’t, you’re losing new business, and new business goes on price, availability, or lead time. Building a portal won’t win those back. It will give the customer a nicer way to not order from you.
If both have shrunk, look at whether the account is buying less overall before you conclude anything. Sometimes the customer is having a bad year and it has nothing to do with either of you.
What each pattern actually means
Read this with your two piles in front of you.
| Criterion | What it means | What responds | What will not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reorders down, new lines steadyThe best version of this problem, because it’s the cheapest to fix and the customer hasn’t left. | Your competitor is easier for routine purchases. The buyer still likes you; they just did the easy thing at 7pm. | Self-service reordering, order history, and Replenishment ordering is a recurring order that repeats on a schedule, so a customer receives the same items at the same interval without placing an order each time. It’s the B2B version of a subscription. What is replenishment ordering? for the predictable lines. | Discounting. You will lose margin on business you were going to lose anyway. |
| New lines down, reorders steady | You aren’t being considered for new business. Usually price, stock, or lead time, in that order. | Knowing why you lost. Ask five customers directly. It’s uncomfortable and it’s the only reliable source. | A portal. It answers a question nobody is asking you. |
| Both down at one account | A relationship problem or a commercial one, and often a person who left. | A conversation, held by someone senior, quickly. | Software of any kind. |
| Both down across many accounts | Something structural: a price position, a service failure, or a market shift. | Finding out which before spending anything. | A project chosen because it’s the one you know how to start. |
The uncomfortable question worth asking
When a competitor’s portal comes up in a board meeting, it’s usually because a salesperson heard about it from a customer. That’s a real signal and it’s a secondhand one, and the version that reaches you has been through two retellings.
Ask five of your customers what they use the competitor’s portal for. Not whether they like it. What they do on it. The answers are consistently narrower than the fear: checking stock before phoning, pulling a copy of an invoice, reordering a consumable. Three specific jobs rather than a wholesale migration of the relationship.
That matters, because three specific jobs is a portal and the wholesale version is a storefront, and the difference between those two projects is most of a year and most of a budget. It’s worth an afternoon of phone calls to find out which one you’re facing.
If it is genuinely the portal
Then you’ve the good version of this problem, and the order to fix it in is not the order people usually choose.
Start with order history and status, because it’s the largest share of what buyers use these things for and your ERP already holds every field. Add reordering next, since a buyer who can repeat last month’s order in three clicks stops comparison shopping the routine lines. Availability comes third and carefully, because a stock number you won’t honour costs more trust than showing none at all.
Price comes last in the build and first in the thinking. If your buyers don’t trust the prices they see, everything above it gets used once. That’s the decision that sets your architecture, so settle it before anyone picks a platform.
The wider picture
This page answers one narrow question. Acro Commerce covers the strategy around it.
Common questions
- Our competitor is much bigger. Can we compete on self-service at all?
- On the routine end, yes, and more easily than on price. A buyer reordering a consumable wants their own price, a stock number they believe, and three clicks. None of that requires scale. Where size wins is breadth of catalogue and next-day everywhere, and no portal you build will close that gap, so pick the fight you can win.
- Should we match their portal feature for feature?
- No, and the feature list is the wrong artefact to be comparing. What decides whether a buyer uses yours is whether the price is right and the stock number is honest. A competitor with twelve features and prices a day out of date loses to four features that are correct.
- How long before a portal shows up in the numbers?
- Adoption is slower than anyone budgets for, because buying habits are personal and a portal asks somebody to change one. Expect the accounts with the most transactional relationship to move first and the ones with the closest rep relationship to move last, and expect some of your own sales team to keep taking the calls. That last one is worth planning for rather than being surprised by.
Last updated 2026-08-24.