Your Branded Customer Portal

The Scenario

Your customers ask you for prices — by phone, by email, by whatever reaches you. You source from your suppliers, add your margin, and quote back. The customer quote tool handles the pricing side; the branded customer portal gives your customers a professional front door for the rest: a place to submit requests, answer clarifying questions, track progress, and receive your quotes.

The portal runs under your brand on your own web address (for example yourcompany.supplier24.ai). Your customers see your logo, your colors, and your company name — never Buyer24, and never anything about how you source.

What Your Customers Experience

Submitting a request — no sign-up wall. The portal opens straight on a chat-style composer: your customer describes what they need in their own words and attaches any files — a spec sheet, a drawing, a spreadsheet, a PDF they got from someone else. Only when they hit Send does the portal ask "Where should we send your quote?" — they enter their work email, type the 6-digit code from their inbox, and the request goes through. Attached documents are read automatically and line items are extracted from them.

A guided conversation. Your Portal Assistant (branded as your company's assistant, or under a name you give it) reads the request, asks for whatever is missing — quantities, part numbers, needed-by dates — and keeps a structured summary of the request up to date beside the chat as details firm up. The assistant also knows what your organization actually sources: if a request includes something outside your range, it sets that item aside and tells the customer, instead of leaving it for your team to triage.

An explicit send step. Nothing lands on your team's desk half-baked. The customer reviews the request document and clicks Send request when it's ready. That's when your team is alerted — and what you receive is already formatted: items, deadline, and attachments composed into a clean RFQ draft.

Progress tracking. Each request shows a timeline — Received → In review → Quote ready → Completed — and the portal home page gives returning customers an overview of all their requests, with a green Quote ready flag when pricing has arrived.

Receiving your quote. When you send a customer quote, the customer gets an email with the quote PDF attached and a View your quote online button. In the portal, the quote appears on the request as the PDF document itself — exactly what you created, opened in the browser or downloaded.

Identity is always a 6-digit code sent to the customer's email — inline the first time they submit, via the links in their emails afterwards. No passwords, nothing to install, and returning customers use Sign in on the portal home to see all their requests.

What Your Customers Never See

The portal shows a customer only their own requests — and only the customer-appropriate slice of each:

Sending the quote is the visibility gate: a draft customer quote is invisible to the customer until you click Send to customer — there is no way for a customer to stumble onto pricing you haven't released.

Enabling the Portal

1. Go to Organization → Branded Portal
2. Choose your web address — a subdomain like yourcompany.supplier24.ai. If you already have a Buyer24-hosted website, the portal shares its address: one host for your whole web presence, with your marketing pages and the portal living side by side. If that site is on your own domain, the portal moves there with it.
3. Set your branding: logo, accent color, and the welcome message customers see on the portal home page — a live preview shows the result as you type.
4. Set the two names the portal uses:

- Display name — your company as customers should see it referred to, in headings and in assistant messages ("Acme's team has been notified")

- Portal name — the label beside your logo in the header, for example Customer Portal or Acme Trade Desk

1. Add navigation links — up to eight links back to your own site (Products, About, Contact, wherever), shown in the portal header. Drag to reorder them.
2. Choose who the portal serves: customers, suppliers, or both. Serving both puts a chooser on the front page.

Don't see the Branded Portal tab? It's enabled per organization — contact us and we'll switch it on for you.

Inside your own website

If you have a Buyer24-hosted site, the portal isn't a separate destination — it runs inside your site's own pages:

• Request a quote is the portal's composer, across the full width of the page, wrapped in your site's header and footer.
• My account is where returning customers follow their requests and open the quotes you've sent. The links in your quote emails land there.
• Your brand carries over on its own. When the site is built, its logo, colours and typography are pushed into the portal, so the form never looks bolted on.

For your customer it reads as one website: they never leave your address, and there is nothing that says "portal" about it. For you, the requests arrive in Buyer24 exactly as they would from a standalone portal.

The form speaks the language of the page it's on. A visitor reading your Spanish page gets a Spanish quote form even if their browser is set to English — the page decides, not the browser.

The portal speaks your customer's language. The interface is available in English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, detected from the visitor's browser and switchable in the header. Your own content — the welcome message, your team's replies, the quote document — appears exactly as you wrote it.

It works on a phone. Customers open portal links from their inbox, which is often on a phone, so the request screen is built for it: the conversation takes the full screen with the composer always in reach, the progress tracker collapses to the current step, and the request document sits behind a button instead of a squeezed column.

Setting Up Your Portal Assistant

The assistant your customers talk to on their requests is the Portal Assistant, listed under Customer assistants on your Agents page. Buyer24 sets it up; organization admins decide how it behaves for your customers:

• Install or uninstall it. Uninstalled, the assistant stays out of every portal conversation: customers are told a person will reply, and your team answers them from the conversation panel.
• Name — on the Identity tab, the name customers see on its messages. Leave it empty and it shows your brand name followed by "Assistant".
• Vibe — how it sounds: formal, brief, friendly, whatever fits your business.
• Your instructions — what it should know about your organization, written on the Core Files tab. The assistant reads them in every conversation and never changes them; customers can't write to them.
• Knowledge — on the Knowledge tab, share Knowledge Base documents by category so it can answer from them. Only the customer-facing categories — Customer FAQ, Products and services and Customer policies — can be shared; everything else stays internal.
• Optional skills — on the Skills tab, switch on extra capabilities, each off until you turn it on:

- Request status — the assistant tells a signed-in customer where their other requests with you stand and whether a quote is ready, without amounts or suppliers.

- Team handoff — when a customer asks for a person, or needs something only your team can do, the assistant hands the conversation to your team and alerts them. It stops answering and tells the customer someone will reply.

Your procurement guidelines still help the assistant spot out-of-range items, but they're never shown or quoted to customers.

Working with Portal Requests

Portal requests arrive in your workspace like any other RFQ, with two extras:

The customer conversation panel. On the request (both while it's a draft and after), a Customer conversation card shows the full portal chat — the original submission, the assistant's clarifications, and everything since. You always see exactly what your customer said and what was captured.

Replying yourself. Type in the conversation panel and your message appears in the customer's portal chat under your name — and the customer gets an email notification with your message and a link back to the conversation. The moment a team member replies, the assistant steps back automatically: it stops answering so you and the customer aren't talking over each other. The Assistant on/off switch in the panel header hands the conversation back to the assistant whenever you're done. If the assistant handed the conversation over itself (with team handoff switched on), your team is alerted and the switch is off in the same way. While the Portal Assistant is uninstalled, the panel shows Assistant uninstalled in place of the switch.

Fulfilment is business as usual. Source the request with your suppliers exactly as you normally would — RFQs, quotes, comparisons. None of it is visible in the portal. When you're ready to price, create a customer quote and click Send to customer.

Tips

• Write a real welcome message. It's the first thing customers read on your portal home page — a sentence about what you supply and how fast you typically quote sets expectations well.
• Share a Customer FAQ. A short FAQ in your Knowledge Base, shared with the Portal Assistant, answers the questions customers ask most — lead times, minimums, delivery areas — without your team stepping in.
• Reply promptly when you take over. Once a team member replies, the assistant stays paused until you switch it back on — the conversation is yours.
• The quote you send is the quote they see. The portal presents your quote as the PDF you generated, so everything on it — terms, branding, layout — is worth a final look before you hit Send.
• Point customers at the right guides. The For Customers section is written for them, not for you — it covers signing in with a code, submitting a request, and picking up a quote. It's linkable if a customer asks how something works.

Related Guides

• Signing In to Your Portal, Submitting a Request, Tracking Requests & Quotes — the same portal, documented from your customer's side
• Agents — installing and configuring the Portal Assistant
• Knowledge Base — the documents it can answer from
• Creating a Customer Quote — producing the quote the portal delivers
• Managing Your B2B Website — the site the portal lives inside
• Using Your Own Domain — putting both on www.yourcompany.com