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Portal Development: When the Shopping Cart Isn't the Entire Customer Relationship

The online store handles the moment the order is placed. For most companies, everything that happens before and after that is handled via phone, email, and PDF attachments. A portal takes these processes out of the inbox and turns them into software.

Your customers call because they can't look it up themselves

Salespeople are asking about their terms and conditions. Service technicians are standing by the equipment and don’t know which replacement parts have been installed. Buyers are asking for the third time about the status of their complaint.

Each of these questions costs your team half an hour. And the answer has long been in one of your systems. It’s just not where it’s needed.

A portal connects ERP, PIM, CRM, and the online store into a single interface. Your customers and partners can look things up themselves and find the data they need around the clock.

What we build

We don't start by asking what a portal should be able to do. We start by asking who will be using it. In practice, this leads to five patterns.

Dealer and Distribution Partner Portals

Customer Portals for Plants and Machinery

Service Processes

Quotation and Request Processes

Leasing, Fleet, and Usage Models

Case Study FLEETLOOP | basecom

FLEETLOOP

A joint venture between Schmitz Cargobull and Greiwing Truck & Trailer, FLEETLOOP rents out semi-trailers. The focus is on local availability, rental periods, and customized terms—not a shopping cart or checkout process. basecom built the portal to MVP status in three months: commercetools manages the fleet, orders, and pricing logic, while the Nuxt front end displays available vehicles on a map. The first rental orders were processed directly through the platform.

Read the case study

Portal or online store? Usually both.

A portal doesn’t replace an online store. It handles what a store can’t: everything that isn’t an order.

Sometimes a portal stands on its own because your business model doesn’t involve an ordering process at all. Sometimes it operates alongside the store and shares the same login, customer data, and product catalog. Your business model determines which approach is right for you.

The second scenario is more common and more challenging because permissions, prices, and customer data must be consistent across both platforms.

Case Study AMAZONE Parts | basecom

AMAZONE Parts

One shop, one portal, one login. AMAZONE Parts sells wear parts through Shopify Plus. The system behind the scenes uses the machine’s history to determine which part is the right fit. Customers don’t even notice this. All they see is a store that knows their machine.

Read the case study

Portal Projects

 

FLEETLOOP
AMAZONE Parts
Brüning
Schmitz Cargobull
WM SE
KADECO
EPR compact

How We Work

A portal is rarely ready after six weeks, but it doesn't have to take six weeks before you see something. We work in five phases, and you're involved in each one.

Clarify Requirements Before Anyone Starts Developing

Design and UX

Implementation in Sprints

Operation and Further Development

Technologies

For custom portals, we rely on Symfony and Vue.js. Both are open source, both have large communities, and both come with no licensing fees and no vendor dictating the roadmap.
If your portal integrates with e-commerce, product data, or content, we’ll incorporate the systems already in use there: Shopware, Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus, commercetools, Pimcore, Akeneo, Storyblok, and Contentful.

Shopware
Magento / Adobe Commerce
Pimcore
Symfony
Contentful
Storyblok
Emporix
Jonas_Dambacher

Jonas Dambacher, CSO

Let us know which processes at your company are still handled via email.

Latest News Articles

FAQs About Portals

What is a customer portal and what is it used for?

What is the difference between a portal and an online shop?

How does basecom's customer portal development process work?

Which systems can be integrated into a B2B portal?

How quickly is a customer portal ready to use?

How is access to data controlled in a reseller portal?

What technologies does basecom use for custom portals?

Why choose basecom as a partner for portal development?

Does the collaboration with basecom end once a portal goes live?

How does a service portal handle maintenance and complaint processes?

What does a portal combined with an existing shop look like in practice?