Express B2B vs.
Infor
Infor SX.e, CloudSuite Distribution, M3, and LN are enterprise ERP platforms built for internal manufacturing and distribution operations — inventory, production planning, purchasing, and financials. Express B2B is a buyer-facing B2B ordering portal. They are not direct competitors: distributors and manufacturers running Infor for back-office operations can deploy Express B2B as the customer-facing ordering interface, with orders flowing back into Infor for fulfillment. This page covers scenarios where a business is evaluating whether to build a buyer portal inside Infor versus deploying a purpose-built ordering layer alongside it.
Infor is a serious ERP for manufacturers and distributors. A buyer-facing ordering portal is not what it was built for — and the cost of building one on top of it reflects that.
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Infor SX.e and CloudSuite Distribution are genuine enterprise-grade ERPs built specifically for wholesale distribution and manufacturing — deep inventory management, demand planning, purchasing, warehouse operations, and financials. For mid-to-large distributors and manufacturers who need serious back-office capability, Infor is a strong platform with decades of industry-specific development behind it.
Infor is not designed to be a buyer-facing ordering portal. Building one on top of Infor requires a certified implementation partner, significant custom integration work, and a budget typically in the $100,000–$500,000+ range with a 12–24 month timeline. The system's power is internal. The buyer experience requires effort to produce.
Manufacturers and distributors at $10M+ GMV who need enterprise-grade inventory management, production planning, and back-office operations. Often used in combination with a dedicated ordering portal — Express B2B can be that portal, surfacing the buyer-facing layer without replacing Infor's internal capabilities.
Infor is doing its job — the buyer portal isn't part of it
Infor SX.e, M3, and CloudSuite Distribution were built for the people inside your company — warehouse staff, purchasing teams, finance, operations. They are excellent at what they do. The buyer-facing ordering experience is a different problem, and Infor approaches it the way most enterprise ERPs do: as an integration project, not a native product.
This means that even if you're already deep in Infor, getting your B2B buyers to a self-service ordering portal requires either a custom web layer built by an Infor partner, a third-party connector, or a standalone ordering platform like Express B2B. The ERP capability doesn't automatically become a buyer portal.
The real cost of building a buyer portal through Infor
We hear from manufacturers and distributors who have gotten scopes for an Infor-native ordering portal. The numbers are consistent: $100,000–$500,000 in implementation costs, 12–24 months to go live, and a certified Infor partner required throughout. That's before ongoing support and maintenance costs that come with any custom integration.
For a $3M–$15M GMV manufacturer with 30–100 trade accounts, the math rarely works. The ROI on a buyer portal is real — orders arrive faster, pricing errors disappear, staff time is reclaimed — but not when the portal costs more to build than the problem is worth. Express B2B solves the buyer-facing ordering problem at a fraction of that cost and without the implementation timeline.
Express B2B runs in front of Infor — your back office doesn't change
This is the important framing: Express B2B is not a replacement for Infor. It's the layer your buyers interact with. Your team still works in Infor for inventory, fulfillment, invoicing, and operations. Your buyers log into Express B2B, see their negotiated pricing, place their orders, and submit. Those orders flow into Infor for processing — nothing in your back-office workflow changes.
This combination is what a purpose-built ordering platform is designed for. Infor handles what it's good at. Express B2B handles what it's good at. Your buyers get a clean, fast ordering experience. Your team gets orders that arrive correctly priced and ready to process — without a phone call, fax, or manual entry step in between.
A real example: a US industrial heating manufacturer runs Infor and Express B2B together
A US industrial heating element manufacturer runs Infor as their back-office ERP and uses Express B2B as the ordering portal for their 50 trade accounts. Before Express B2B, every order arrived by phone, fax, or email — and was manually entered into Infor by a coordinator who also had to look up that account's pricing rules. With 50 accounts each on a different pricing arrangement — volume tiers, fixed lists, or combinations of both — the manual process was fragile.
After going live on Express B2B in five weeks, the coordinator recovered 12 hours per week. Orders arrive in Infor correctly priced, with the right account attached, ready to process. Pricing disputes dropped to zero. Infor is still doing exactly what it did before. Express B2B handles the part Infor was never designed to do. Read the full case study.
Per-account pricing: the Infor problem that Express B2B solves natively
One of the most common pain points for Infor customers trying to build a buyer portal: Infor holds your pricing data, but surfacing it correctly to the right buyer in a web ordering context requires careful integration work. When every trade account has different pricing — a mix of volume tiers, fixed lists, and negotiated rates — the challenge of displaying "this buyer's price for this product at this quantity" accurately in a self-service interface is non-trivial.
Express B2B is designed around this problem. Per-account pricing — any combination of volume, tiered, or fixed rates — is configured per billing account and applied automatically at order time. There's no lookup, no manual cross-reference, no opportunity for the wrong rate to reach the buyer. The complexity that lives in your Infor pricing data becomes invisible to the buyer.
Side by side
The bottom line
Keep Infor for what it does best: your internal ERP operations. Inventory, production, purchasing, fulfillment, financials — Infor was built for that and does it well. Add Express B2B for the part Infor wasn't built for: a fast, clean buyer-facing ordering experience with per-account pricing, multi-site ordering, and approval workflows — live in weeks, not the better part of two years.
If you've been quoting out a buyer portal through an Infor partner and the scope is growing larger than the problem it's solving, that's worth examining. A purpose-built ordering layer can deliver the buyer experience you need without the cost and timeline of a full ERP customization project.
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