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Customer Portal - Overview & Setup

The Customer Portal is a self-service portal for your customers, which they can use to view their sales orders, pay for invoices, check the status of their shipments, update their information, and much more.

This page explains the basic steps you need to do to set up the Customer Portal in your organization. You can learn more about the functions in the Customer Portal, as well as the preferences that you can configure to make the portal work just the way you need it to.

Enabling the Customer Portal

The Customer Portal is enabled for your organization by default, and the URL to access it is auto-generated based on your organization’s name. To let your customers or their contact persons access the Customer Portal, you will have to send each of them an invite. You can view the portal URL and change it if necessary, before inviting your customers to the portal.

There are 2 ways to invite customers to the Customer Portal:

Prerequisite: Your customers must have an email address associated with them to access the Customer Portal.

Insight: If your admin has enabled the preference Allow customers to sign up to the Customer Portal, your customers can sign up by themselves and access the Customer Portal using the link shared with them.

Enabling the Customer Portal for Existing Customers

To enable the Customer Portal for existing customers and their contact persons:

Go to the Customers module under Sales from the left sidebar.
Select a customer.
Click the More dropdown and select Configure Customer Portal.
Select the contact persons for whom you want to enable the Customer Portal.

Click Save.

Now, Zoho Inventory will send an email invite to your customers, which they can use to access the Customer Portal.

You can also configure the language that’s used in the Customer Portal for individual customers. Here’s how:

Go to the Customers module under Sales from the left sidebar.
Select a customer.
Click Edit.
Select a Portal Language in the Other Details section.

Click Save.

The portal language will be changed to the one you’ve configured for that customer.

Enabling the Customer Portal for New Customers

To enable the Customer Portal while creating new customers in Zoho Inventory:

Go to the Customers module under Sales from the left sidebar.
Click + New to add a new customer.
Enter the details as required.
Mark the Allow Portal access for this customer option in the Other Details section.

Select the Portal Language, which will be used for this particular customer.
Click Save.

An invite email will be sent to your customer, which they can use to access the Customer Portal.

Pro Tip: You can invite multiple customers to the Customer Portal at the same time using Bulk Actions. To do this, go to the Customers module and select one or more customers from the list view. Click Enable Portal from the More Actions dropdown. Now, an invite email will be sent to the Primary Contact of the customers that you had selected.

Accessing the Customer Portal

After you’ve invited your customers, they can use the invitation email to log in to the Customer Portal. The invitation email will contain the following:

The URL to access the Customer Portal.
Your customer’s username for the portal.
An Accept Invitation button, which your customer must click to log in to the portal for the first time.

You can check whether the customer has accepted your invite by going to the Customers module and selecting the customer. The invitation status will be displayed in the Overview screen.

The Reinvite option can be used to resend the invitation email to your customers when they have missed the email or couldn’t find it.

Customer Portal Activity Updates

Your customers can use the Customer Portal as a way to communicate with you. Here’s how:

When your customers view an invoice for the first time in the Customer Portal, you will get an in-app notification, and Zoho Inventory will also show a Viewed (eye) icon near the invoice.

Apart from invoice updates, you will also receive in-app notifications for other important customer activities that take place in the portal, such as making payments and adding comments. You can choose whether you want to be notified about these events via email through the Customer Portal Preferences.

Disabling the Customer Portal

To disable the Customer Portal for a customer:

Go to the Customers module from the left sidebar.
Select a customer.
Click the More dropdown and select Configure Customer Portal.
Unselect the contact person for whom you want to disable the Customer Portal.
Click Save.

Now, your customer will no longer be able to access the Customer Portal.