Your store knows orders. It doesn't know relationships.
Your store platform is good at checkout. It's less good at the part that keeps a small brand alive: noticing that a customer has ordered six times, that a wholesale buyer hasn't reordered in two months, or that a "where's my order?" email has sat unanswered since yesterday.
That context usually ends up scattered across the store admin, a support inbox and a wholesale spreadsheet. A CRM puts it on one page per customer.
How the E-commerce setup is laid out
Everything Portal has a ready-made E-commerce setup for online stores and product brands. When you choose it, the portal speaks your language from day one:
- People are Customers, the work is Orders. Each customer record holds their history, notes, tags and every email you've traded.
- A Customer pipeline with three stages: Cart, Purchased and Repeat. It shows at a glance who's still deciding, who has bought once and who keeps coming back.
- Fields for Order count and Lifetime value, alongside name, email, phone and lead source.
- Tags like first-order, repeat and wholesale, so you can filter a wholesale account like a local grocer apart from a retail shopper.
Everything is renameable. Add a VIP stage, a field for preferred product line, or a separate pipeline for wholesale accounts with stages like Sample sent, Ordered and Reordering.
Automations for the moments that matter
Each automation is a trigger, then steps that tag, send an email, assign, create a task or wait. A few that fit a store:
- Deal stale for 2 days in Cart: send a short, friendly email asking if they have questions about the product.
- Tag added: first-order: wait a week, then send a how-to-use-it email from your own domain.
- No activity for 90 days on a repeat customer: tag them for a win-back email and create a task to review the list.
- Tag added: VIP: assign the account to the owner and create a task to send a personal thank-you note.
- Email received from a wholesale account: assign it to whoever manages wholesale, who gets a team chat alert.
For more ideas on bringing customers back, see win back lapsed customers.
A day at a small brand
You open the portal and ask Spera, the AI assistant, "which wholesale accounts haven't ordered in 60 days?" She lists three. You ask her to draft check-in emails, read them, and confirm before anything is sent.
Customer emails land in one shared inbox, threaded by conversation and filed on the customer's record, so whoever answers sees their order count and past messages. A wholesale buyer asks for net-30 terms, so you send the agreement for e-signature and an invoice with line items, tax and discount. You see when the invoice email is opened and when it's viewed, and you record partial payments as they arrive. Card payments on invoices aren't available yet, so the invoice shows your payment instructions.
At the end of the month, your goals show orders and new customers against target, with today's pace and where the month will land.
Connecting your store
There's no built-in connector for store platforms today, so be clear on what that means. Contacts can come in from a spreadsheet import, from your website forms (which post straight into contacts with the lead source set to Website), or from your store if it can send webhooks to the portal's incoming webhook address. Every call is logged. There's also an API, and we can build a custom connection to your store platform so orders update Order count and Lifetime value for you. See integrations.
Business texting and online card payments are coming, and you can follow them on the roadmap. For why we connect directly instead of through middleware, read direct integrations vs Zapier.
Getting started
Export your customer list from your store, import it, and map columns to Order count and Lifetime value. Tag your wholesale accounts, connect your Gmail or Microsoft 365 mailbox, and turn on two automations to start. Most stores can work from it within a week.
