What a B2B Dealer Portal Should Do for a Door Manufacturer

A B2B dealer portal for a door manufacturer should let each trade account log in, see its own prices, enter orders against your sizing rules, attach a PO, and pay on terms without a phone call or a spreadsheet. If your dealers still email you PDFs and photos of handwritten lists, the portal's job is to move that work onto a screen that catches mistakes before they reach the shop floor.

Why door manufacturers outgrow email orders

Most door shops start the same way. A few cabinet makers and kitchen dealers send orders by email, someone in the office retypes them into the production system, and questions go back and forth until the sizes, profiles and finishes are clear.

That works at ten orders a week. At fifty, the office becomes the bottleneck. Every retyped line is a chance for a transposed number, a missed hinge bore, or the wrong edge profile. Every "can you confirm the finish on line 14" email adds a day to lead time.

A dealer portal changes who does the data entry. The dealer, who knows the job, enters the order once. Your rules check it as they type. Your office reviews a clean order instead of building one from scratch.

The core jobs of a b2b dealer portal

Here is what a door manufacturer should expect a portal to handle on day one:

1. Separate logins per dealer account, with team members under each account so a shop owner and their estimator can both place orders.
2. Account-specific pricing, so each dealer sees their own tier and never sees another dealer's price. See dealer pricing tiers without the spreadsheet for how to structure this.
3. PO numbers on every order, because your dealer's accounting team will match your invoice to their purchase order.
4. Net terms for approved accounts, with invoices issued automatically. The details are in Net 30, POs and credit limits.
5. Bulk line entry for dealers who think in cut lists, checked line by line against your size limits.
6. Order status the dealer can look up without calling you.
7. One-click reorders for repeat jobs and matching replacement doors.

If a portal does all seven, a large share of the routine calls and emails to your office has somewhere else to go.

Sizing rules belong in the portal

A dealer portal for doors is only as good as the rules behind the order form. Doors have constraints that generic B2B stores do not understand:

• Minimum and maximum width and height per door style (a five-piece Shaker door has a minimum rail and stile width that limits how small it can go).
• Grain direction on veneer and solid wood.
• Hinge bore placement and count based on door height.
• Drawer fronts with different minimums than doors.
• Profile and finish combinations that are not offered together.

When these rules run as the dealer types, an impossible door never becomes an order. That is the difference between a portal and an online form.

Comparing what is on the market

Several tools sell B2B ordering to woodworking manufacturers. Here is a quick look at how pricing for the dealer side is publicly listed, as of September 2026:

Allmoxy is a full production system. If you already use it, the question becomes whether your dealer and homeowner ordering should sit in front of it and sync orders across, which is how Inlay works with Allmoxy.

What dealers actually care about

Your dealers are running their own businesses. They want three things from your portal:

Speed. They want to enter a 40-door kitchen in one sitting, ideally by pasting or uploading the list they already have.

Certainty. They want to know the order is right before it is submitted, and they want to see when it moves to production and when it ships.

Margin protection. Many dealers resell to homeowners. They do not want their client to see your price. A portal that lets them produce quotes under their own name, at their own markup, is worth a lot to them. More on that in letting dealers quote under their own name.

Rolling it out without losing anyone

Moving dealers from email to a portal works best in stages:

1. Start with your three or four most active accounts. They have the most to gain and will give the most useful feedback.
2. Load their current pricing tiers and confirm they see what they expect.
3. Ask them to place their next real order through the portal while you still accept email as a fallback.
4. Fix anything confusing, then invite the rest of your accounts.
5. Set a date after which new orders come through the portal, with your office still available for questions.

Keep the phone line open. The goal is fewer retyped orders. Conversations with dealers still matter as much as ever.

How Inlay handles this

• The dealer portal runs from the same catalogue as your homeowner checkout, so you maintain one set of products and rules.
• Each dealer account gets its own login, price tier, PO field and optional net terms (Net 15, 30 or 60) invoiced through your own Stripe account.
• Dealers can paste or upload a CSV or cut list, and every line is checked against your size and option rules before submit.
• Dealers see order status, reorder in one click, add team logins with approval limits, and send quotes to their own clients under their own logo and markup.
• Orders sync to Allmoxy or any system that accepts a webhook, CSV or email.

Book a 20-minute demo to see the dealer portal with your own door catalogue.