Hi, everyone. I appreciate all the feedback. We do read all of these. I want to touch on two points:

1. Rewards on More Brands

You are soon going to see the Portal Select status show up for brands you already have direct accounts with. This will allow you to start earning rewards on more purchases. This feature required additional technical implementation, which we are finishing up now. Until now Portal Select has only been available to dealers who didn’t already have an account with the participating supplier. This will open up Portal Select for many more brands you already buy. This is a big focus for us - helping you earn rewards and send orders using Portal to your existing vendors you love and support.

2. We’re Not Perfect

I know, crazy, right? I worked with dealers on our Dealer Happiness team for almost four years before moving to the supplier side of our business. I've talked to hundreds of dealers on demo's, calls, shows, etc. I love reading the posts where dealers boast about how great we are and how much time we save, but I also love the critical posts. The critical ones always contain at least a nugget we can use to improve. One thing i’d like to suggest though… Let’s try not to “win” the arguments about whether Portal is simply “amazing” or “shit”. It’s really not that binary and only seems to cause tension. The truth is that both opinions are right, or at least somewhere in the middle.

In theory, a single web catalog for ordering should save you time, plain and simple. Going to 1 website vs. 10 is better. I think we can all agree on that. There are major challenges in deploying that in a way that works for everyone, with hundreds of suppliers who don't necessarily all know who we are. We work hard, with dealers and suppliers, to keep that data current and accurate. If you trust the feeds from your suppliers on portal, the process of ordering can only be simplified. We don't completely eliminate the need to go to a vendor portal, there are things we don't provide you - like your purchasing level, VIR status, technical documents, training etc. But in terms of purchasing, it should be simpler, especially when used in conjunction with our proposal tool.

Our platform (scratch that), our INDUSTRY is incredibly complex, so we’re not always going to get things right the first time. Based on the thousands of users who are on our site every day, we know we’re doing many things right. We aren’t even close to being done though, we have so much to improve, and we will. Change is very difficult for established industries like ours, which is why seemingly simple tasks like getting a data feed from a supplier can take much longer than anyone would like. For example, we want to tell you that companies like Control4, Sonos, Sony (Tech Data) are fully integrated. These large companies are taking much longer than we could have imagined, despite agreeing to integrate (we are actively working with all of them right now, FYI). We appreciate your patience as we continue to improve. I’d like to thank all our supporters, and for the haters... We’ll win you over soon, all the new stuff we work on is for you!