Portalink & Shopify target offline B2B sales with automation

Australian technology firm Portalink has formed a partnership with Shopify to automate B2B sales order processing, targeting what is described as a costly and persistent inefficiency in global commerce.

The joint solution will be available to Shopify Plus customers worldwide from January 2026, allowing businesses to handle email and offline orders with the same level of automation as online transactions.

Manual order challenge

Many manufacturers and suppliers still receive the majority of their sales orders in non-digital formats, with approximately 70% arriving via email. These orders are usually processed manually, resulting in significant labour costs and a high risk of data entry errors. Research indicates that manual order handling can cost suppliers an average of USD $75 per transaction, with a business handling 100 daily orders potentially spending upwards of USD $2 million annually on order processing.

Automation through integration

The new partnership will see Portalink's technology-capable of extracting order data with what it claims is 100% accuracy from email, PDF, and Excel order forms-integrated directly into Salesforce's platform as an installable app. This aims to eliminate the need for manual data entry and streamline order processing irrespective of the ordering method.

Traditional methods such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) have only partially addressed these challenges, often being expensive, slow, or lacking accuracy in capturing unstructured data.

Scalability and speed

Portalink reports that its system can rapidly onboard thousands of customers at a time, automating trading partner processes without the typical lengthy implementation times associated with EDI. The company says its technology has already automated global customer service centres for multinationals such as Schneider Electric, Ecolab, and Saint-Gobain, resulting in more than 80,000 trading partners moving away from manual entry.

Industry perspectives

"Portalink is an Australian based company. We're a company that has focused for the last 10 years on order automation of all of the bad orders. Let's call them orders that create a huge amount of effort and frustration for merchants and suppliers because they're coming by email, they're coming by fax, they're coming by sales reps and they all too often have to be manually entered into the ERP system or the order management system," said Tim Pope, Chief Executive Officer, Portalink.

Pope further detailed the benefits for a wider range of businesses, including those not at the enterprise tier:

"What is also very exciting is our partnership with Shopify because we have in the past been a company that has been working with the big enterprise end of town. It's taken 6 to 9 months to implement our product in each of those organizations.

"The implementation that we've done with Shopify, the deep integration that we've done with the data sets that are already available within Shopify to manage online orders are now being leveraged for Portalink, making it a turnkey solution.

"And this is really exciting. Why? Because it means that even medium or even very small companies can now have the same benefits that we're seeing at the large enterprise end of town, that we're dealing with in a way that is not only fast, frictionless, but it's also something that you know can be done well in a cost effective way at scale. So we're very excited about this," said Pope.

Sector response

The scale of the challenge remains significant. According to B2B commerce expert Andy Hoar, "This number actually astonished me when I saw it - $17 trillion. This is the estimated amount of offline commerce that hasn't gone online yet."

Jonathan Day, Managing Director at Aligent, pointed out the versatility of Portalink's solution across market segments: "Now we have an opportunity to build this integration architecture once and take advantage of it across all these different channels. And then when you look at SME, they don't have time to be keying in orders. And that's at the core of where Shopify merchants are too.

"If we can help them run their business more effectively, that gives them more time to focus on their customer. So you know, I think I can see a value proposition across all of the different customer segments as well as just about every vertical I've seen."