Building a B2B Order Portal for a Make-to-Order Dairy
A custom order booking platform I built for Sable Hills Farm — a Tanzanian dairy in Iringa producing artisanal cream cheese, mascarpone, crème fraîche, ricotta, feta, halloumi, and yoghurts. Their retailers apply, get approved, and place orders that automatically organize into the farm's four weekly production rounds. Scoped, built, and delivered live in one week.
Who is Sable Hills Farm?
Sable Hills Farm is a regenerative dairy in south-west Tanzania. They make artisanal cheese and yoghurt — cream cheese, mascarpone, crème fraîche, ricotta, feta, halloumi, and yoghurts in 1-litre and 150-ml cups — for retailers, restaurants, and hotels across the country. Their existing website (sablehillsfarm.com) runs on GoDaddy's Website Builder and does what a marketing site should do: tell the brand story.
What it did not do — and could not do — was take orders in a structured way.
The Problem: Why a Spreadsheet Couldn't Scale
Sable Hills Farm doesn't hold stock. Because their products are perishable and volumes are precise, the farm runs a make-to-order model: orders accumulate, milk is collected on a schedule, and production runs to fill exactly what's been ordered. That happens four times a week, tied to four delivery days — Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday — each with its own cut-off.
Orders were arriving by WhatsApp, phone, and email. Every round, the team was manually transcribing them into an Excel schedule, chasing missing details, guessing which round a late order should slot into, and calculating per-client totals by hand. Milk collection is expensive; running a production round for a light order book is a loss. Filling rounds efficiently mattered — and doing it manually did not scale.
"The old workflow was orders in three different apps, one shared Excel sheet, and a lot of WhatsApp back-and-forth. Every production round started with a scramble."
The Solution: A Subdomain Portal, Tied to Production Rounds
Instead of rebuilding the client's main website, I built a dedicated B2B order portal that lives on a subdomain — order.sablehillsfarm.com — and is linked from the existing GoDaddy site as an "Order Portal" page. The main site was not touched. The portal handles the entire workflow that Excel and WhatsApp were failing at:
- A vetted application-and-approval gate — only trade customers Sable Hills wants to serve can place orders
- A product catalog with photos, descriptions, shelf-life per item, and quantity picker (no prices — per-client pricing lives in QuickBooks, so the portal stays out of that)
- Automatic assignment of every new order to the correct production round based on the cut-off time
- Manual override so the admin can move orders between rounds when it helps fill a light run
- A round summary export (PDF and Excel) with product totals, tray counts, pack and expiry dates, and a per-client breakdown — one document that drives the whole production run
- Email notifications to
orders@sablehillsfarm.comon every submission
How the Portal Works — Step by Step
The workflow that turns a new retailer into a repeat customer, and every order into an item on the production schedule:
- Retailer submits an applicationA prospective retailer opens the portal, fills out an application form with business details, and submits. The application lands in the admin panel and copies to the orders inbox by email.
- Admin approves and activates the accountThe admin reviews the application in the portal. On approval, the system automatically emails the retailer a set-password link. The retailer clicks, sets a password, and the account is active.
- Retailer places an orderThe approved retailer logs in, browses the product catalog with photos and shelf-life details, picks quantities, and submits an order. Orders stay editable by the retailer until confirmed.
- Order auto-assigns to a production roundThe system checks the current time against the farm's four weekly cut-offs and slots the order into the next available round. Miss a cut-off, and the order moves automatically to the following round — no manual sorting needed.
- Admin exports the round summaryBefore each production run, the admin exports the round summary as a PDF or Excel file — product totals, tray counts, pack and expiry dates, per-client breakdown, all in one document. This replaces the farm's manual Excel schedule and drives the kitchen's plan for the day.
Key Features
Application & Approval Workflow
Retailers can't just sign up and start ordering. Admin reviews every application and approves the ones that fit — protecting the farm's customer base.
Set-Password Activation Email
On approval, the retailer receives a secure one-click link to set their password. No manual credentials, no shared logins.
Photo-First Product Catalog
Products include photos, descriptions, and shelf-life per item. Photos are managed by admin — upload once, retailer sees them next login.
Four-Round Weekly Scheduler
Every order is auto-assigned to Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday production based on cut-off times. Late orders roll forward automatically.
Move-Order Admin Control
Admin can move any order between rounds to balance production load — critical because milk collection runs are expensive to underfill.
Round Summary PDF + Excel
One-click export of the entire round: product totals, trays needed, pack and expiry dates, per-client split. Replaces the farm's manual Excel schedule.
Editable Orders Until Confirmed
Retailers can adjust their own orders right up to confirmation, cutting down on "please change my order" emails to the admin.
Email Notifications to a Shared Mailbox
Every submission notifies orders@sablehillsfarm.com — a Microsoft 365 distribution group so both admin users are looped in automatically.
The Tech Stack — And Why
The portal is the same architecture I use for every production system I build for clients, tuned to real African connectivity conditions:
React + Vite for a fast, modern frontend that loads quickly even on slower connections. Supabase gives me a Postgres database with built-in authentication, storage for product photos, and Row-Level Security so retailers only ever see their own data — no client-side hacks required. Cloudflare Workers deploys the whole app to a global edge network, so a retailer in Dar es Salaam and one in Arusha both get fast page loads. Resend handles all transactional email — application approvals, set-password links, order confirmations — reliably.
The whole stack costs the client a few dollars a month to run at their volume. That matters: a lot of custom software becomes a burden over time because the infrastructure cost creeps up. This one doesn't.
Delivery Results
The full portal — database schema, authentication, application-approval workflow, product catalog, order form, production-round logic, PDF and Excel exports, and email notifications — was scoped, built, and delivered live in one week. Client testing began immediately after handover.
Current status: live in production and in daily use. Both admin users are working with real applications and orders through the portal. The manual Excel schedule that the farm used to run production from has been retired in favour of the round summary export.
Next-round backlog (already scoped): sending order emails from the client's own orders@sablehillsfarm.com address via SPF/DKIM, a dedicated Customers screen for admin management, automatic round-locking at cut-off, and a milk-requirement calculator that turns each round summary into a milk-order for the farm.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a B2B order portal, and when does a business need one?
A B2B order portal is a private web application where a business's vetted trade customers — retailers, wholesalers, restaurants, or resellers — submit orders directly instead of by WhatsApp, email, or phone. A business needs one when orders start slipping between messaging apps, when the same product keeps getting quoted at different prices, or when scheduling production around scattered orders becomes a manual mess. Sable Hills Farm reached that point at a dairy that runs make-to-order production, four times a week.
Why not just use a standard e-commerce platform like Shopify?
Standard e-commerce assumes stocked inventory and public checkout. Sable Hills Farm runs make-to-order: no stock sits on the shelf, orders are accepted only from vetted trade customers, prices differ per client (kept in QuickBooks), and every order must land inside one of four weekly production rounds. None of that fits an off-the-shelf storefront. A custom portal — with an application-approval gate, no prices shown, and automatic round assignment — matches the actual business model.
Can the portal work with an existing website like GoDaddy or Wix?
Yes. Sable Hills Farm's main website is built on GoDaddy Website Builder. The order portal runs on a subdomain (order.sablehillsfarm.com) and is linked from the main site as an "Order Portal" page. The main website was not touched. This approach lets any small business add a custom application on top of a builder-hosted site without rebuilding what already works.
How long did the Sable Hills Farm portal take to build?
The portal was scoped, built, and delivered live in one week (four to seven working days), including the Supabase database, application-approval workflow, product catalog with photos, order form, production-round logic, PDF and Excel export, and email notifications. Client testing began immediately after handover.
What happens when a retailer misses the cut-off for a production round?
Ordering is always open. When the current time is past a round's cut-off, the system automatically assigns new orders to the next available round. The admin can also manually move orders between rounds in the admin panel — for example, to fill a lightly-booked round so the milk collection run stays cost-effective.
Can I get a portal like this for my own business?
Yes. A custom B2B order portal starts from $800 USD and typically ships in one to two weeks, depending on how many workflow rules and admin exports are needed. The best fits are food producers, farms, wholesalers, and specialist suppliers whose customers place recurring orders and whose orders drive production or fulfilment scheduling. Message me on WhatsApp to scope a fixed price for yours.