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How buyers order on the portal

Your customers can place real orders on the Customer Portal themselves: they fill a cart, check out — choosing which branch they are ordering for if they have multiple locations — and pay online. Orders placed on the portal flow into your Admin Console as sales orders and follow your normal fulfilment cycle.

Before you start​

  • Activate the buyer's registration from the Pending Approvals tab in the customer list. Only approved buyers can order. See Give your buyers a self-service portal.
  • To accept online payment at checkout, connect a payment gateway — Stripe or Razorpay — in Settings > Integrations.

How a buyer places an order​

From the buyer's side, the ordering flow is:

  1. Browse or search the catalog by category, brand, or product.
  2. Add items to the cart and review it.
  3. Check out — buyers with multiple locations choose which branch they are ordering for, then pay.
  4. Track the order — the order appears in the buyer's order history, where they can follow where each order is.

What happens to over-limit orders​

Portal checkout supports the buyer organization's internal approval flow:

  1. If the buyer's organization enforces internal spending limits, an order that exceeds a team member's limit is routed to their designated approver.
  2. The approver reviews the order in the portal and approves or declines it.
  3. Only then does the order proceed.

See Buyer accounts, teams, and approvals for how buyer teams and approvers work.

Faster ways for buyers to reorder​

Your customers have two shortcuts for repeat purchasing:

  • Quick order — a fast ordering path for buyers who already know what they want.
  • Saved shopping lists — buyers save reusable shopping lists and reorder from them.

What happens on your side​

  1. The portal order arrives in the Admin Console as a sales order.
  2. Confirm it, allocate stock per line to a warehouse, ship partially or in full, invoice, and collect payment — the standard quote-to-cash cycle.

Tips​

  • Buyers can also view and accept quotes you send them, directly in the portal — an accepted quote converts into a sales order with one action on your side.
  • Buyers can view their invoices and submit returns requests themselves, reducing calls to your team.
  • Online payments are handled by your connected gateway (Stripe or Razorpay); Growmax ARC records the commercial documents and integrates with your accounting software for the general ledger.