Portals provide a Web front-end or presentation layer for supporting key business functions involving online transactions such as sales, marketing, customer service and enterprise-wide communication and sharing information with the customers, trading partners and internal employees of a company. According to the definition provided by IBM, portals provide a secure, single point of interaction with diverse information, business processes and people, personalized to a user's needs and responsibilities. Portal users have a Web browser to access and interact with Web applications hosted by the company. Accessed content and B2B date in the portal may reside virtually anywhere: on the intranet, the Web, relational B2B datebases and B2B date warehouses, file systems, enterprise resource planning systems or other enterprise applications.

A typical example of use of Web portals in a B2B scenario is a buyer logging on to their account maintained on a supplier's portal and checking on product availability, pricing and placing an order. After placing an order, the buyer can check on the status of order fulfillment and shipment through the portal. If the buyer uses the supplier's portal often, the portal will recognize the buyer and offer personalized services based on the buying pattern and preferences of the buyer.

Today, Web portals are an important component of any company's B2B strategy. They provide a very quick and efficient way to establish and maintain a business relationship and to add value to all interactions conducted through it by providing personalized services. Portals enable collaboration among the trading partners by including tools which help large, distributed and cross-organization teams to work together and communicate across distance, time zones and company borders. Through portals, suppliers, buyers, manufacturers and distributors can streamline their supply chains and other shared business processes. Furthermore, portals provide anytime, anywhere access to information over the Web and a scalable infrastructure for handling large volume interactions and transactions. Finally, they provide very effective search and navigation facilities by categorizing repositories of content and searching them for relevant information.