Sell & distribute
Reach more business buyers.
mPorts Distribution is a B2B commerce and distribution platform for manufacturers, brands, distributors and business buyers. It supports product and catalog discovery for business buyers, quoting and purchasing workflows, order placement, and post-purchase fulfillment visibility and returns.
Who this is for
Two sides of the same transaction. Distribution is worth looking at when one of these descriptions is recognisably you.
If you sell
Manufacturers, brands and distributors
You have products and capacity, and you need business buyers who order repeatedly — without running quotes through email and approvals through a spreadsheet.
If you buy
Business buyers
You buy to a specification, in quantities that need approval, and what happens after the order matters more to you than the checkout did.
The problem it addresses
Business buying does not look like consumer buying. A buyer arrives with a specification rather than a wishlist, asks for a quote before committing, orders in quantities and combinations that need approval, and cares more about what happens after the order than about the checkout itself.
Running that on a storefront built for consumers means the difference gets absorbed by people — quotes in email, approvals in spreadsheets, order status in phone calls. It works until volume arrives.
What a business buyer actually does
- 01
Discover
Finds products through a catalog built for business selection criteria, not consumer browsing.
- 02
Engage
Requests a quote and works through a purchasing workflow, rather than dropping items in a cart.
- 03
Transact
Places the order, with the record kept where operations can act on it.
- 04
After the sale
Sees fulfillment progress and raises returns without opening a support ticket.
What changes when the workflow is the software
Nothing in the left column is broken. It is what every company does before the volume arrives, and it is also what stops scaling first.
Business buying on a consumer storefront
- Quotes negotiated in an email thread
- Approvals tracked in a spreadsheet, or in somebody’s head
- Order status answered by a person on the phone
- Returns raised as a support ticket and chased
- Every new buyer adds coordination work, not just revenue
The gap absorbed by people
The difference between how business buying works and how a consumer checkout works does not disappear. It gets absorbed by your team, one message at a time, until the volume makes that impossible.
Business buying with the workflow built in
- Quoting and purchasing as part of the product
- The order recorded where operations can act on it
- Fulfillment progress visible to the buyer without asking
- Returns raised in the same place the order lives
- Another buyer is another buyer, not another coordinator
How it relates to the rest of mPorts
Distribution is where the order is created. mPorts OMS is where everything after it is operated — inventory, fulfillment, shipment and returns, across every channel, including channels that have nothing to do with Distribution.
The two are separable. A company can run Distribution as its route to business buyers while operating fulfillment somewhere else, or run OMS across existing channels without Distribution at all.
- Distribution creates the demand and the order
- OMS operates what happens next
- mPorts OMS connects both to the systems outside
Where the handover happens
One transaction, two halves. Distribution owns everything up to and including the order; mPorts OMS owns everything after it. The handover is a record passing between them, not a re-key.
The buyer
And your operation runs it
- Orders
- Inventory
- Fulfillment
- Shipment
- Tracking
- Returns
The buyer sees
Do you need both?
No. A company can run Distribution as its route to business buyers while fulfilling somewhere else entirely, or run mPorts OMS across the channels it already sells on without ever touching Distribution.
Which one to start with is a question about where the work currently hurts. If buyers are the constraint, start here. If the orders already arrive and serving them is the constraint, start with the OMS.
What this page does not claim
We have not published a customer list, a transaction volume, a catalog size or a buyer count. No such figure is currently supported by evidence we would stand behind, so none appears here.
Questions buyers ask
- Is this a marketplace or our own storefront?
- It is a B2B commerce and distribution platform. Which of those two shapes it takes for your business is a question about how you want buyers to reach you, and it is worth a conversation rather than a checkbox.
- Do we need mPorts OMS to use Distribution?
- No. The two are separable. Most companies find the question becomes interesting once order volume makes the operational side the harder half.
- How is this different from listing on a marketplace?
- A marketplace puts you in someone else’s aisle on their terms. Distribution is a route to business buyers built around business buying — quoting, purchasing approval, and what happens after the order. Which shape suits you is worth a conversation rather than a checkbox.
- What does a buyer actually get?
- A catalog they can select from on business criteria, a way to request a quote and work through a purchasing workflow, order placement and order history, and visibility of fulfillment and returns after the sale — without opening a ticket to find out where something is.
- Can it work alongside our existing ERP?
- mPorts is designed to run alongside the systems you already have, connecting to them rather than replacing them. Whether your specific ERP can be connected depends on whether that connection has been built.