Meeting Buyers Where They Are: Why You Can't Force Portals on Everyone

It’s a story we hear every day: “We spent $50,000 building a custom B2B portal on Shopify Plus. We emailed all our customers. And 80% of them still send us PDF purchase orders.”

Is your portal bad? No. Are your customers stupid? No.

They are just entrenched.

The ERP Lock-In

Your biggest customers (Universities, Hospitals, Fortune 500s) do not shop. They procure.

Their internal process looks like this:

1. Purchase Request created in SAP/Oracle.
2. Manager approves Request.
3. SAP generates a Purchase Order (PDF).
4. System emails PDF to Vendor.

To use your portal, a buyer has to:

1. Take the data out of SAP.
2. Log in to your website.
3. Manually re-type the order into your cart.
4. Checkout.

You are asking them to do double entry. You are asking them to break their internal compliance rules. They won’t do it.

The “Meet in the Middle” Strategy

You cannot force a Fortune 500 company to change their procurement software just to buy your widgets.

Instead of fighting the PDF, embrace it.

• For Small Buyers: Push them to the Portal. It’s great for Mom & Pop shops.
• For Enterprise Buyers: Let them send the PDF. Use AI extraction (like PO2Order) to turn that PDF into a Portal Order automatically.

This is the “Omnichannel” approach to B2B. You get the structured data you need (in Shopify), and they keep the workflow they require (PDFs). Everyone wins.