Anchor Group Podcast: Episode 15
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- Caleb Schmitz, CRO at Anchor Group
- Michael Mueller, eCommerce Account Executive at Anchor Group
- Anchor Group (Company Page)
Podcast Transcript
Caleb (00:00)
In episode 15, we're going to be talking about different features we've seen in e-commerce, mostly in B2B, but it’ll also touch on B2C, that direct-to-consumer side as well. Across the board, we’ve seen a range of features on both SuiteCommerce and BigCommerce—features we’ve helped build out and get live for our clients. Really, this is about showing the art of the possible.
These are ideas you might want to consider for your own customer portal. To start off, I’ve got a list of probably 15 things to go through, and I know you do as well from some of the opportunities you’ve been working with, Michael. But one thing I want to mention is that there are really three different areas of e-commerce as a whole: Shopping, My Account, and Checkout. Most of the features I’m talking about today fall into one of those three areas—that’s going to be my main focus.
Actually, in the B2B space, there are probably even more features within the My Account section, since B2B often has customer-specific functionality. One of my favorite things to install for people is our Saved Search extension.
This is specifically for the NetSuite ecosystem. A saved search is a way to query data out of NetSuite, and you can configure one to show up in My Account so the customer can see a table of ERP information. It’s a great way to surface ERP data directly to your customers, helping to avoid unnecessary phone calls for miscellaneous questions. Instead of a rep having to go into NetSuite, look up the info, and respond manually, you can just surface that data directly in the portal. It saves time and reduces labor. So that’s my first one. What do you have?
Michael (02:02)
The first one I have also falls under what we call My Account in the NetSuite world. In BigCommerce—which I work in a lot—you have a standard account section for typical B2C websites. But in BigCommerce, you can also get an app called the B2B Edition app, which essentially builds out a buyer portal that functions similarly to My Account for a B2B company using NetSuite.
That brings me to my first feature on the BigCommerce side: managing quotes through that portal. When you bring in the B2B Edition app, the merchant can effectively go back and forth on quotes with their B2B customer. The customer can get really specific quotes that meet their needs in a simple and streamlined way. So that’s the first feature I’d highlight—something cool that Anchor Group has built into the buyer portal experience.
Caleb (03:14)
Let’s stay in the portal a little longer—I’ve got a few more things there. A couple other pieces come to mind. These may be separate, but one is quick: in the B2B space, a lot of these organizations are manufacturing companies building customer portals. That means within the ERP, like in NetSuite, you’ve got work orders and assembly processes. When you receive a sales order, you don’t always have the inventory available. You might stock some items, but often it’s make-to-order, and that kicks off your manufacturing processes.
So in NetSuite, a sales order might go through an engineering or approval process, which generates a work order. That leads to assembly, consuming raw materials, and completing the build. You might even have WIP and routing steps that show each stage of the manufacturing cycle. Once built, the item can be fulfilled.
If you’re a manufacturing company where that process takes four weeks, your customers will constantly be asking, “When will I get this part? Is it still on track?” because they’re likely doing their own project management.
One thing I love about surfacing ERP data in My Account is being able to show the status of that work order. You can let customers view not just “order received,” but where the item is in the process, how many steps remain, whether dates have changed, and more. All of that data already exists in NetSuite—we’re just making it visible. That’s a huge benefit for manufacturing companies in the B2B space. I’ve got one more for My Account.
Michael (05:05)
Yeah. And Caleb, being able to surface that information for your customers in My Account—I think we’d both agree that’s incredibly useful for the sales process. It helps keep customers happy and wanting to continue doing business with you by offering transparency about where their products are.
In B2B, we’re not talking about $25 orders. These are often worth thousands of dollars and can be complex. On the BigCommerce side, one tool merchants use to keep sales moving and communication clear is a feature in the buyer portal called Sales Masquerade.
If I’m a salesperson with a territory of 50 to 100 companies, I can be given permission to log in on behalf of those companies, adjust quotes, and customize their accounts as needed. It allows the salesperson to stay involved and provide clear communication, but without being the bottleneck. It’s a powerful tool for better self-service and a more tailored experience.
Sales Masquerade is a technical term for this, and it’s something unique to the BigCommerce B2B Edition.
Caleb (06:50)
Love that. A big concern I hear from clients on the B2B side is that they’re afraid of losing the personal relationship when moving to a customer portal. But they’re also afraid their competitors already offer one, and their customers are asking for it.
They’re trying to find a balance. What I like to pair with that masquerade feature is showing the sales rep assigned to the customer—along with their photo, phone number, maybe even a Zoom link—so they can jump on a call and share screens.
This way, you’re not only providing a smooth user experience in the portal, but also preserving that personal relationship. The customer sees the rep they’re used to talking to, sees their face in the portal, and maintains that connection.
If a customer needs to reach out, they can do it easily, and the rep can log in, masquerade as the customer, and help guide them through the portal. It’s a good blend of both worlds: self-service paired with personalized support. That’s why I really like that feature.
Michael (08:35)
Now Caleb, I’ve got a question for you—and let me preface it a little bit. I’ve spoken with customers before in the manufacturing space, and there have been some who get hesitant or raise red flags when they hear “customer portal.” They don’t want something super self-service because, like you’re saying, they want their sales reps to still be the first point of contact.
I’ve even seen cases where people just hit the brakes entirely—stop the project—because they feel strongly that sales reps should be the first line when talking with customers. But as you’re pointing out, a buyer portal can really be the first interaction in the B2B purchasing cycle.
Do you think those folks who say, “No, we need our salespeople to be the first point of contact,” are justified? Or are they holding back from adopting a buyer portal as effectively as they could? What have you seen in your experience working with manufacturers?
Caleb (09:42)
Of course, it’s valid. I think that’s a very fair concern. I don’t think it’s absolutely true that it’s the best way to do things—and maybe someone’s first reaction would be, “Yes, it is.” But I’d say, take a minute. Is it? Just pause and really consider it.
Then I’d ask a few more questions. What if your sales rep could shift away from those routine accounts that don’t care about interaction and are just eating up labor? You’re paying someone a salary. Do those customers actually care about that personal contact?
I’d say relationship is important—there’s definitely a place for that. But could there be another way for your rep to build that relationship? Maybe they’ve never had time to send a thank-you card or a gift basket because they’re too busy handling orders and dealing with transactional conversations.
What if they could focus on more meaningful engagement? You’ve only got so much time for order entry. But that relationship-building doesn’t have to come only from order handling. In a lot of B2B situations, you still have that opportunity. It doesn’t have to disappear.
Freeing up that time lets reps find new accounts or think more strategically—writing a note, dropping by in person. Things they may not normally have time to do. That’s why I’d challenge that mindset. It’s often just the way things have always been done. It’s different, but different doesn’t mean wrong.
Michael (11:39)
I’d piggyback on that. I talked with someone this week who said, in their industry, working through a sales rep can sometimes mean waiting days for a response. Say a customer needs a thousand units—they might not hear back for 24 to 72 hours.
Even if, as a manufacturer, it feels good to have that rep talking with the customer, from the customer’s point of view, it might feel inconvenient. With a buyer portal—like you said—you can speed up the order process, get to the sale faster, and still leave room for that human touch. That interaction just shifts.
So yeah, thanks for answering. I know it was a bit off topic—not exactly a “feature”—but it’s something I’ve been curious about.
Caleb (12:48)
Yeah, I think whenever we talk about features, it’s important to ask why they’re useful in the first place. If there’s resistance, let’s walk through an exercise. What if things were different? What if we imagined a new future, not just what’s being done now?
That’s part of what working with a partner on e-commerce implementation should do—help you think outside the box.
Here’s one example: some manufacturing companies need to generate documentation as part of their process. Maybe it’s heat numbers or something in food and beverage. They need to create PDFs and send them to customers for traceability.
What often happens is their customers request these docs, and someone internally has to look them up on the item record, download them, email them, and repeat this constantly. My Account can help here—another feature is “My Documents.”
You can store and surface documents from the ERP, tied to an order or an item, and let customers access them directly. That might include PDFs, product documents, or even marketing collateral—especially if you work with wholesalers who need that material. That’s one use case where surfacing documents becomes really helpful in the B2B space.
Michael (14:34)
Yeah, and let’s be honest—don’t underestimate the power of organization. Just having structured systems in place to keep a business organized is huge.
Some manufacturers are still keeping manila folders in a drawer. But bringing that process online—essentially creating a digital file cabinet—can streamline everything and reduce the risk of losing documents or wasting time finding them.
Caleb (15:10)
Yeah, there are a few more My Account features that come to mind. One common one in the B2B space is the ability to pay invoices from within My Account.
Now, it’s not always as simple as “here’s a customer, here’s an invoice.” Sometimes companies have multiple locations, set up as sub-customers. They want to pay invoices from the parent account.
We’ve built out the ability to surface all sub-customer invoices so the parent can pay everything in one checkout flow.
Or take a case where a single customer is tied to multiple subsidiaries and is receiving invoices from each. We’ve enabled a single checkout experience so that person can log in and pay all open invoices across those subsidiaries in one go.
These are advanced capabilities that go beyond just “pay invoice”—they reflect the complexity of B2B structures and help simplify payments across multiple customer records.
Michael (16:29)
Yeah, those are all great ways an organization can optimize the operational efficiency of its business, especially through the portal. I want to point out one in the BigCommerce space that does exactly that. If you have a BigCommerce website and download the B2B Edition app, you can create companies within that app. It extends your native website functionality.
You can also create hierarchies of employees within each company. That helps your customer manage their team internally. For example, if they hire an intern for the summer and that intern’s job is to build shopping lists or catalogs tailored to their company, they can do that. But you don’t have to give them permission to actually place orders or request quotes.
Within the company profile, you can assign roles to users. It starts with three standard roles, and you can adjust permissions from there. You can have everyone from an intern to a full administrator, and you choose what access levels each person has.
I bring that up because it supports operational efficiency. Now the VP or SVP—who’s maybe the admin on the account—doesn’t have to be the one building shopping lists or placing every order. Someone else on their team can build it out, send the quote for approval, and once it's approved, they’re good to go. Products are on their way.
Caleb (18:29)
You stole my next two—contact management with permission-based contacts and delegated purchasing. You stole my next two.
Michael (18:31)
There you go. And here’s what I’ll point out. Between some of these platforms, a lot of the capabilities are pretty similar, if not the same, in some capacity. So Caleb, I think it’s worth diving into what sets them apart—what gives one the edge over the other.
Of course, you’re talking about NetSuite, so you have to have NetSuite to access the features you’re mentioning. On the BigCommerce side, you don’t need NetSuite. You could be using a different ERP entirely, but you do have to be on BigCommerce. It’s compatible with other software and systems, too.
Caleb (19:12)
Now that we’re switching from My Account to shopping and checkout, I only have a couple, and I really just want to focus on shopping. In the B2B space, I see a lot of product listing or category pages where companies don’t want the traditional display layout.
They want to see products in a table format—each product in a row—with input fields for quantity so users can quickly add items to the cart. That grid view for wholesale is a great feature. It restructures the category experience to better fit B2B buyers.
Michael (20:05)
I’ll echo that. That’s huge for some companies. It makes the buying experience so much better, especially if their customers are used to managing things with Excel spreadsheets. Keeping the interface aligned with how they already work makes ordering that much easier. I totally agree with you on that one.
Caleb (20:25)
Yeah. Another thing I’ve seen is around landing pages. In B2B, companies often aren’t focused on SEO. What they care about is giving their customers as much information as possible to make a purchasing decision.
That includes technical specs or documentation related to a product—like installation instructions. You’ll typically see that kind of content on the product page, but I’ve also seen companies that need to host more general or technical documentation not tied to a specific product.
They want a dedicated landing page for that content, with filtering options and a search bar so customers can easily find what they need. That’s another common B2B feature—creating a resource hub that’s not buried in a product detail tab but is available on its own landing page.
Michael (21:55)
So you’ve said two things recently, and I’d like to pull both together on the BigCommerce side. We built something for a manufacturing company—let’s say it was an assembly line conveyor system. They said, “Hey, we’ve got customers who need to find specific parts for this system easily on our website. We don’t want them buried in a parts catalog.”
So, like you were saying about configuring a product listing page, we were able to take what was essentially a PDF diagram of the conveyor system, place it on the product listing page, and build out that grid view of parts you mentioned earlier. We also made the image dynamic, so when you click on a specific part in the diagram, it automatically scrolls down and selects that item in the grid. That way, the customer can easily add all the SKUs and parts they need for that assembly.
I just wanted to bring that up as a unique use case—something not every manufacturing company will need, but a great example of how you can combine a custom product listing page with that grid view for a better ordering experience.
Caleb (23:24)
Yeah, and what you’re really describing is an exploded view of an assembly. So if someone needs a replacement part, they can see the reference image, click on the part, and go straight to that item to add it to the cart. That way, they’re confident they’ve selected the right component for the right assembly or sub-assembly.
You can use native category pages for this. A category page could represent an assembly, and a subcategory could represent a sub-assembly. That’s a great way to use e-commerce architecture to streamline reordering and replacement parts. One of my favorite approaches, honestly.
I’ve found other use cases too. Let’s say I’m a wholesaler with a vendor supplying 200 products. I need to place an order with them. It’s really inconvenient to visit every single product page and click “Add to Cart” 200 times. Most of the time, these orders exist in CSV format or something easily convertible.
That’s where a CSV Add to Cart feature comes in. You can drag and drop a CSV file, and it extracts all the items and quantities, then adds them to the cart. It can also flag errors—like if it can’t find a specific line item—and let the user decide to either remove it or search for it separately. That’s been a really useful feature for large, consistent B2B orders via purchase order.
Michael (25:22)
Yeah, and in the same vein, another useful feature is simply having a search bar configured to recognize SKU numbers—or even adding a separate SKU-specific search bar. Even though a global search might pick up on SKUs, having one labeled clearly can help customers who think in SKU numbers.
Sometimes we’ve even created a dedicated SKU search landing page. BigCommerce has some pre-made themes with that feature built in, and merchants love it. It makes the buying process faster and simpler.
Caleb (26:16)
Yeah, totally agree. One way we’ve built that is through a global search bar with a toggle. So when someone types something in, the search doesn’t have to guess if it’s a keyword or a SKU number.
The toggle lets users choose between searching by keyword or by part number/SKU. That way, the system knows how to prioritize results. If you’re searching by SKU, it won’t pull up random keyword matches. It shows the correct result faster and more reliably. Search bars are definitely worth investing time in, especially for B2B users who are navigating by SKU.
Michael (27:15)
Absolutely. And I’ll say—global search bars are one of those built-in perks of modern e-commerce platforms. You get high-quality search across the entire site. That might sound obvious now, but for companies still running sites built in 2008 or 2010, that’s a major upgrade.
It’s not that their current setup is “bad,” but modern platforms like SuiteCommerce and BigCommerce offer big improvements by default. That includes search functionality, which is critical in today’s B2B experience.
Caleb (28:01)
Yeah, that’s true. I’ve seen a few other interesting upgrades people are requesting lately.
One common one in B2B is a product inquiry form on the product detail page. The key is that it passes the SKU directly to the support team, so they immediately know what the inquiry is about. That cuts down on back-and-forth.
And then there are more unique requests, like companies wanting their customers to upload their logo into the portal. When the customer logs in, the site swaps out branding and colors, personalizing the experience based on who’s logged in. That’s another way to create a tailored experience in B2B.
Michael (28:56)
Caleb, question on that last one. If a merchant wants that kind of personalized portal branding, how involved is that? Does someone on the back end need to manually upload the logo? Or can it be automated?
Caleb (29:15)
There are two ways. Either someone on the back office team uploads the logo when the customer signs up, or the customer can self-service it within their My Account. So it can go either way.
Michael (29:31)
Yeah, I see. Okay.
Caleb (29:32)
Yeah. I’ve got one last one. Occasionally, I see companies that want to generate not just product detail pages, but a large number of custom landing pages.
Think of it like this: e-commerce runs off a table of products—each row is a product, and each row generates a product detail page. Similarly, some companies have informational pages they want to generate in bulk. We’ve built tables where each row generates a unique landing page.
And instead of managing every page manually through a CMS, they can use a CSV to bulk update things like titles or content. That’s really helpful when you’ve got thousands of pages and don’t want to click into each one.
I’ve seen this especially in the wholesaler space—often in the design world—where manufacturers are working with contractors or interior designers and need to give them access to design pages tied to certain products. So that’s one more way to scale content in a structured, efficient way.
But that’s about all I’ve got today. We just brainstormed a bunch of ideas right before this—things that came to mind from recent projects. These are just a few examples from the thousands of hours of development our team has done across BigCommerce, SuiteCommerce, and NetSuite. Hopefully, this gives you a sense of what’s possible in B2B e-commerce.
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