A gated portal for your contracted resellers — with the deal reg, MAP, MDF, sell-through reporting, and warranty pass-through that B2B webstores can't do.
You make products. You don't sell direct — your distributors do. You have somewhere between 20 and 500 contracted partners spread across territories, tiers (master, sub, authorized dealer, VAR), and product lines. Your VP of Channel manages the program. Your field reps spend their days entering POs into your ERP from PDFs distributors have emailed in, instead of coaching the partners actually capable of growing their book.
The portal you bought eighteen months ago doesn't help. It takes reorders. That's it. The deal-reg conflicts still get mediated over phone. MAP violations on Amazon still surface from a Google Alert one of your product managers set up in 2022. Q1 MDF claims are still in three Excel sheets. The CFO still asks for sell-through and you still can't produce it.
A B2B webstore was the wrong tool. You needed a distributor portal.
This is the most important distinction on the page. Don't let a vendor blur it.
Shopify B2B, BigCommerce B2B, Adobe Commerce, OroCommerce
Salesforce PRM, Impartner, ZINFI, Channeltivity
These are not the same product. The comparable systems for what you actually need are PRM platforms — Salesforce PRM, Impartner, ZINFI, Channeltivity — not Shopify. If a vendor is showing you account-based pricing and calling it a distributor portal, ask them to demonstrate deal-registration conflict detection, MAP violation escalation against an Amazon listing, and MDF claim reconciliation against an annual partner entitlement. Watch the demo end.
Work through this list before you sit through a single vendor demo. A real distributor portal does all seven. A B2B webstore can fake one or two.
Not "tier 1, tier 2, tier 3." Contract-managed price files: this distributor, on these SKUs, at these tier breaks, with Q2 promotional overrides, with the rebate schedule that triggers at 110% of prior-year volume. Master distributors get sub-distributor cascade pricing. Some SKUs are excluded from certain partners entirely. Renewed annually. Enforced automatically.
Minimum Advertised Price. Monitor listings across Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Google Shopping, distributor websites. Detect violations. Send graduated warnings. Escalate to chargebacks or partner-status downgrades. Track violation history per partner. Integrate with Trackstreet, PriceSpider, Pricer24, or Wiser if you want third-party monitoring. The Cleveland CIO's Shopify B2B has zero ability to know this is happening, let alone act on it.
Two distributors call on the same multifamily HVAC retrofit. Whoever timestamps the registration first gets margin protection. Without deal reg your top partners eventually stop bringing you opportunities, because they're tired of being undercut by the partner down the street. Intake form, channel-manager approval, conflict detection against existing registrations, protected pricing, expiry rules with extension requests, win/loss tracking.
Market Development Funds — usually 1–3% of a partner's prior-year purchases — for local marketing, trade shows, training events, lead-gen campaigns. Pre-approval requests, claim submission with proof-of-execution (invoices, photos, attendance lists), reviewer workflow, partial approvals, payment release, ledger reconciliation against annual entitlement. The thing currently living in three Excel sheets and one departed regional manager's laptop.
You generate a lead through your corporate site, a trade show, or a paid campaign. The lead is in a territory served by three of your distributors. Which one gets it — on what basis (territory, vertical specialization, tier, certification status, current pipeline load, deal-reg conflicts)? Accept/reject mechanics, contact-time SLAs, status updates back to the manufacturer. This is how you give the channel real value beyond price.
Sell-in is what you shipped to the distributor — you know that from your ERP. Sell-through is what the distributor moved off their shelves to end-customers. You don't know that unless they tell you. Weekly sell-through feeds drive rebate calculations, MDF accruals, replenishment guidance, gray-market detection, and the OTIF / fill-rate (line and case) numbers your CFO actually wants.
Distributor logs the end-customer serial and failure mode. You validate against the warranty policy. You ship the replacement direct to the end-customer or credit the distributor for one out of their inventory. Audit trail per partner. Quality data feeds back to your engineering team. A B2B webstore can take a return. It cannot run a warranty pass-through credit program with serial-level traceability.
Your distributor portal runs on the same OrderHUBx platform that handles your direct B2B and D2C orders, if you have them. One ERP integration. One pricing master (with per-partner contract overlays). One reporting view across sell-in, sell-through, channel inventory, and direct demand. One warehouse operation that ships a tier-A master distributor's release order in the morning and a D2C Amazon FBM order in the afternoon, off the same allocated pool, to the same SLA discipline.
Add channels without buying another system. The B2B webstore for direct buyers stays where it is — we don't replace it. The PRM-class channel governance lives here, with the order engine, where the data has to be anyway.
Distributors order in five different ways. The platform accepts all of them on the same data model.
Credentialed login per partner. Per-partner contract pricing applied automatically. Catalog scoped to authorized SKUs. Order history, open invoices, MDF balance, deal-reg status, training certifications all in one place.
For tier-A master distributors operating on EDI. We accept inbound 850 purchase orders, return 856 ASNs, and send 810 invoices. VAN-routed or AS2 direct. Transaction-level audit trail.
For partners who issue an annual blanket against negotiated pricing and call off releases monthly. The blanket lives in the system. Each release validates against remaining commitment. Invoice rolls up against the master.
Your inside sales rep takes the call from the distributor and enters the order on their behalf, with rep-credit attribution preserved on the line. The kind of thing a Shopify cart was never going to do.
The deal-reg form is itself an intake channel. Approved registrations carry protected pricing into the order when the partner converts the opportunity. The portal connects the registration to the eventual PO.
Some partners still order by email. OpsMind reads the PDF, parses line items, validates against the partner's contract pricing, and stages the order for confirmation. We don't make distributors change overnight.
The order intake channel doesn't change what happens next. Routing reads the partner record — tier, contract priority, allocation rules — and assigns the order to the right warehouse. Allocation respects tier-A precedence on constrained SKUs (your master distributor's release does not get bumped by a D2C Amazon order on the last six units). PackScan handles the floor work with barcode-verified picks. BatchTrack records the lot and serial numbers shipped against this distributor on this PO — the data you will need two years from now when the warranty claim comes back. ShipX rate-shops the carrier for the destination. The tracking number returns to the partner's portal record. RMAs and warranty pass-through credits flow back through the same engine, against the same partner master.
Same engine your direct B2B orders run on. Same engine your D2C orders run on, if you have them.
A scorecard is what turns the channel from a list of accounts into a managed program. Per partner, per quarter: sell-through versus quota, OTIF, fill rate (line and case), on-time payment, MDF utilization against entitlement, deal-reg accuracy, MAP-violation count, certification currency, sales-engineer training completion. Tier reviews drive partner-status changes. Underperformance triggers a documented improvement plan instead of an awkward call.
The scorecard is generated from data the platform already has — orders, shipments, payments, returns, MDF claims, deal-reg outcomes — not from a separate reporting tool a manager updates manually the night before the QBR.
Two weeks of foundation (vendor lock-in, master-data load, lighthouse-distributor selection). Two weeks of build and UAT in sandbox with real contracts. Two weeks of pilot launch with three to five lighthouse distributors. Then a structured rollout wave by wave through the rest of the network. The mistake the failed implementations all share: trying to launch all 80 partners at once, against a generic configuration, on a date the CRO committed to before talking to anyone in operations.
Pick a lighthouse. Get the data model right against one real distributor's contract. Then scale.
Ten longer essays on the operational, contractual, and behavioral parts of running a distributor network.
The seven-capability framework that separates PRM from B2B commerce, and why confusing them costs eighteen months.
The behavioral and structural reasons distributors resist self-service portals — and what to do about it.
What field reps should actually do once they stop entering POs all day — and how to measure it.
Sell-in versus sell-through, weekly distributor feeds, gray-market detection, replenishment guidance.
How to make per-partner contract pricing and MAP policy hold up under real-world channel pressure.
The credit-back workflow that lets distributors handle the call without losing the audit trail.
The three workflows that most channel teams still run out of email — and why they shouldn't.
What the first eight weeks of a real distributor portal rollout actually look like, week by week.
The three policy levers that prevent distributors from quietly losing faith in your program.
Sell-through, OTIF, fill rate, on-time payment, MDF utilization, certification currency — the metrics that drive tier reviews.
Bring your partner-tier structure, your contract pricing model, and one lighthouse distributor in mind. We'll show you the order flow, the deal-reg workflow, and the sell-through view against your own data shape.