B2B Ecommerce ROI Calculator

Treat it as a channel shift, not a traffic model. Count the orders your customers will place on the portal instead of by phone, email, fax or through a rep, and price what each one stops costing you: staff minutes at a loaded hourly cost, plus the drop in error rate times the cost of an error. Add rep time moved to selling, fewer order-status calls and extra spend only if you have grounds for them, then subtract the subscription, maintenance and the one-off implementation and ERP integration. With this page’s example — 36,000 offline orders a year, half of them moving to the portal over a 3-month build and a 9-month ramp, $9 saved on each order that moves — year one nets $6,500 (a 10.7% ROI), payback lands in month 12 and three years net $258,500. Every line of the formula is printed under “How is this calculated?”.

Because a portal earns its return through adoption, and adoption takes time. The one-off implementation and integration cost is counted up front, subscription and maintenance are billed from month 1, and in the example no customer orders online until month 4; the portal share then climbs for nine months before it reaches the full 50%. Year one therefore carries all of the one-off cost against only five months’ worth of full-adoption savings, while years two and three earn the full saving against running costs alone — which is why the example shows 10.7% in year one and 194.4% over three years. Judge a portal on its payback month and three-year net benefit, not on year-one ROI alone.

The share of orders that will move to the portal, and the staff minutes an offline order really takes: together they set the size of the saving. Time a normal day on the order desk rather than guessing — keying, checking price and stock, confirming, correcting. The scenario buttons move the portal share 20% either way (40% and 60% in the example), which moves year one from −11.5% to 32.8%. Error rates matter less here: in the example they are $1 of the $9 saved per order. The three optional lines — rep time, order-status calls and extra spend — start switched off because they are the easiest numbers to overstate. For the four cost lines, use your quotes, and add internal project time to implementation if you want a fully loaded figure.

Only if you tell it to. “Extra spend on portal orders” starts at 0%, so the default result rests on cost savings alone. Some platform vendors’ calculators pre-fill a revenue uplift for you; a vendor’s figure is not evidence about your customers. If you have evidence of your own — accounts already ordering online compared with similar accounts that are not — enter the difference you measured. The model applies it only to the orders that move to the portal and counts the gross margin on it, not the revenue: at the example’s $1,000 order value and 25% margin, 2% extra spend adds $90,000 of gross profit a year at full adoption.

The ecommerce ROI calculator models a store winning new orders: more sessions, a higher order rate, and contribution per order after returns, payment fees and fulfilment. This calculator assumes the portal serves customers you already have, so the number of orders stays the same; what changes is how they arrive and what each one costs you to handle. If your investment is mainly about bringing new buyers to a storefront, use the ecommerce calculator; if it moves existing accounts from phone, email and reps to self-service ordering, use this one.

The pre-filled numbers are demonstration defaults that produce a realistic example — they are not claimed industry averages. Replace them with your own figures for an accurate result. Where a field is labelled as an assumption, adjust it to match your business; the methodology page lists every default and its status.

Calculating stores nothing: every calculation runs in your browser, there is no account, and nothing you type is sent while you calculate. Only if you download the PDF report do we receive the work email you enter plus a short summary of the inputs you modelled, so we can follow up — the privacy page states exactly what is kept.