A trailblazing partnership between Shopify and Australian technology firm, Portalink, is expected to solve one of the biggest challenges of B2B commerce globally – the cost of manually processing sales orders.
The partnership, announced in New York this week, will see Portalink’s industry-leading technology integrated into the Shopify platform in the form of an app that industry commentators have described as game-changing.
Portalink, a leading transaction automation technology company, will enable Shopify merchants to be the first businesses in the world to experience true omnichannel B2B commerce, with the ability to receive and process all online and offline orders through a single platform, regardless of the buyer’s preferred ordering method.
The Shopify x Portalink partnership solves one of the most prolific challenges in B2B commerce – the cost, inconvenience, and risks associated with manual data entry.
On average, 7 out of every 10 businesses send orders by email, requiring the seller to manually enter each order into their own systems before they can pick, pack, and ship.
Independent research estimates that every non-digital order costs a supplier, on average, US$75 due to the manual effort, high error rates, costly disputes, and slow order-to-shipment turnarounds.
By way of example, a business that receives 100 email orders per day will typically spend in the region of $2 million every year just processing orders.
Despite 60 years of existence, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) – the automated, computer-to-computer exchange of business documents – has only partially solved this problem. Implementing EDI for each trading partner is complex, inflexible, slow, and very expensive.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is another technology that is similarly outdated, lacking the necessary accuracy to effectively automate the long tail of unstructured order forms.
In 2015, Portalink invented a technology that captures granular order data in emails, PDF and Excel order forms, with 100% accuracy. Portalink’s technology remains best-in-class to this day with a blue-chip portfolio of clients that includes companies like Schneider Electric, Ecolab and Saint-Gobain.
By automating the global customer service centres for these three organisations, Portalink has automated more than 80,000 trading partners that previously required manual data entry – testimony to Portalink’s ability to rapidly scale without risk. (See case studies here.)
Portalink CEO Tim Pope says that the Australian-headquartered business has for the past ten years focused on automating “bad” orders for its growing list of clients.
“These are orders that create a huge amount of effort and frustration for merchants and suppliers because they’re coming in by email, by fax or through sales reps, and they all too often take hours to manually enter into the business’s ERP or order management system.” said Pope
Built for and deeply integrated within the Shopify platform, Portalink™ AnyOrder is expected to be available globally to Shopify Plus customers in January 2026 as a downloadable app on the Shopify Marketplace.
Portalink’s Tim Pope said that Portalink™ AnyOrder is known for being fast, frictionless and cost-effective when implemented.
“The partnership with Shopify means that merchants can now expect the Portalink™ AnyOrder implementation to have the same speed and frictionless efficiency,” explained Mr. Pope.
“By putting an end to the wasteful inefficiency and high error rates that are unavoidable with manual data entry, Shopify x Portalink promises to solve one of the biggest problems for businesses.”
“This platform will positively impact productivity, profitability, customer service and customer retention by accelerating order-to-shipment cycles of offline orders (email orders) with the same speed and efficiency as online orders. It is a true milestone development in B2B commerce,” added Mr. Pope.
