Email vs. portal vs. marketplace: a B2B ordering framework

Email, portal, or marketplace — which should B2B orders come through?

All three — because they're three different jobs, not three competitors for one slot. Email keeps existing customers ordering with zero friction and no commission, but hands you unstructured messages. Your own portal gives you structure and ownership, but fights for adoption. A marketplace like Faire buys you new buyers, at a commission and on the platform's terms. B2B buyers order wherever is easiest for each purchase — McKinsey's B2B Pulse counts buyers using around ten channels, double the five of 2016 — so in practice orders arrive across all three no matter what you pick.

The useful question isn't "which channel." It's "what is each channel good and bad at, and how do I keep any of them from becoming a manual mess?"

Why do most B2B orders still arrive by email?

Nobody decided B2B would run on email; it just does, because email asks nothing of the buyer. No login, no app, no onboarding — the same inbox they use for everything, for a one-line reorder or a complicated special. That's why, for most distributors, the bulk of existing-customer orders still arrives this way (with the phone right beside it for the buyers who'd rather talk — behavior we unpack in why B2B buyers still call).

The strengths are real: maximum reach, zero adoption friction, no commission, full ownership of the customer and the data. The weakness sits entirely on your side: an emailed order is unstructured. Someone has to read it, interpret it, match it to the catalog, and key it in — cost you can size with the manual order entry cost calculator. The channel isn't the problem. Handling it by hand is.

What does your own portal buy you?

A portal flips email's trade-off. Orders come in structured and validated, customers self-serve around the clock, you own the relationship and the data, and there's no commission. On paper it's the ideal channel.

The catch is adoption. A portal per supplier doesn't scale for a buyer who orders from dozens of suppliers, so many default back to email. We make that argument in full in the death of the B2B portal and won't relitigate it here. The short version: a portal serves the share of your customers who'll genuinely adopt it, and leaves the rest exactly where they were. A good channel for a minority; not a destination for everyone.

What does a marketplace actually cost?

Marketplaces — Faire in wholesale, Amazon Business in procurement, vertical platforms in industries like beverage — solve the one thing email and portals don't: discovery. They put you in front of buyers who were never your customers, and the category is big and growing: Digital Commerce 360 counts more than 750 B2B marketplaces, with marketplace sales growing several times faster than B2B e-commerce overall.

The price is literal. Industry reporting clusters marketplace take rates around 5–15% of order value; Faire, for example, charges brands 15% on marketplace orders plus processing fees — and 0% on customers you bring in yourself through Faire Direct. On wholesale margins, that's significant. The deeper cost is structural: the marketplace owns the buyer relationship and the data, your pricing sits next to competitors', and you're exposed to whatever rule or fee changes the platform makes next. A marketplace is reach you rent, not a customer base you own.

How do the three compare side by side?

	Email	Your portal	Marketplace
Buyer adoption friction	None	High	Low (on-platform)
Order structure	Unstructured	Structured	Structured
Commission / take rate	None	None	~5–15% (industry reporting)
Who owns the customer	You	You	The platform
Who owns the data	You	You	The platform
Reach / new buyers	Existing only	Existing only	New buyers
Best at	Keeping existing customers ordering easily	Self-service for adopters	Discovery and acquisition
Main weakness	Manual handling on your side	Customers won't all adopt it	Margin and ownership

Read down the columns and the roles separate cleanly. Marketplaces are an acquisition channel — worth the take rate to find new buyers, a poor deal for recurring accounts you already own. A portal is a self-service channel for the customers who'll use it. Email is the relationship channel — where your existing customers already are, and where most repeat revenue actually flows.

Email

Buyer orders from the inbox they already use

No login, no adoption friction, no commission

The order arrives unstructured

Someone reads it, matches it, and keys it in

You own the customer and the data

The relationship channel — where repeat revenue flows

Your portal

Buyer logs in and self-serves

Structured orders, no commission

Adoption is the fight

A portal per supplier doesn't scale for buyers

You own the customer and the data

Self-service for the share who'll adopt it

Marketplace

New buyers find you on-platform

Discovery — the one job the others don't do

Reported take rates ~5–15%

Faire: 15% on marketplace orders, 0% via Faire Direct

The platform owns the relationship and the data

Reach you rent, not a customer base you own

What this means for distributors

Stop picking. Use a marketplace to find new buyers and treat the commission as acquisition cost. Offer a portal for the customers who'll self-serve, and don't be surprised when many won't. Expect the bulk of recurring orders to keep arriving by email — and the phone to keep ringing beside it.

The real risk isn't choosing the wrong channel; it's letting one become a manual bottleneck. A marketplace order and a portal order arrive structured by definition. The email lane — the biggest one — is where the manual cost hides, and that's the lane a capture layer exists for. For small and mid-sized US wholesale distributors on QuickBooks Online, that means the emailed orders — body plus PDF and spreadsheet attachments — get captured, matched, and priced automatically, a person reviews every draft, and the result lands in QuickBooks Online as an Estimate (or Google Sheets/CSV), with phone orders added in one click as manual entries. PeasyOrders is that layer — not a portal, not a marketplace, no buyer login, no commission. The operating model is in how to capture wholesale orders without a portal.

The takeaway

Email, portal, and marketplace are three different jobs. Marketplaces buy reach at the cost of margin and ownership. Portals buy structure at the cost of adoption. Email costs the buyer nothing and costs you manual handling — and it's where most of your real business already happens. The distributors who get this right don't bet on one channel; they receive across all three and make sure the unstructured lane lands as cleanly as the structured ones.

PeasyOrders starts at $99 a month with a 30-day money-back guarantee — see pricing.