Does Jetbuilt have an extensive product database like Portal?

Can you add photos to each product line item?

Can customers accept proposals online like Portal?

I wouldn't mind paying for Jetbuilt, as these Portal issues seem to be never-ending.

You have to do a lot more work in Jetbuilt. They have a trial period if you want to try it

I'm pretty comfortable on the basic Jetbuilt platform now. I do find a lot of skus aren't loaded, but that could be something I'm doing wrong too. Dawn, photos are very easy to add on the fly. You can't do an online signature with the basic setup, but I think you can on their Enterprise option. I can send you a PDF bid, if you like...

Yes that would be great.

Thanks.

[email protected]

Thanks to Tom for sending me a Jetbuilt sample proposal. Very impressive!

Did anyone actually get DM'd about rewards?

My last payment was in July.
Their system isn’t saving me time or money.

I have actually started using them recently. I'm ordering my SONOS stuff thru the Select program now. My regular distributor is charging me OVER normal distributor price & I do not get any free shipping, no matter how much I order.
So Portal is saving me a little money.

But it is funny... I'm using them like a regular distributor for just a few of the Portal Select lines they offer. Which is not what their business model is about (has been about).

I could never see how the business model they were pushing can possibly work. Historically for thousands of years of merchants & trade, you want to get as few middle men in your process as possible. Their whole business model had been to add a middle man and make it better. Seems impossible on any level - despite them saying they are not another middle man; arguably a 'side man'?
Maybe that is why their business model seems (to me anyway) to be shifting (i.e proposal software, themselves a distributor, etc.).

Anyway, the interaction with their staff on orders has been exceptional.

I take back my comments on the previous pages about being excited to work with portal. We are hearing massive amount of complaints from our dealers that we are being deselected as the place to send the POs to as well as pricing games to try to get dealers to buy from portal select instead of us.

This isn't how a business should be ran. Shame on the manufactures who also allow this to happen.

Hi, everyone. Looks like some clarification is in order for rewards. We messaged all dealers with cards through the app (personal message via the in-app chat) updating everyone on the delayed rewards payout. Here is that message. August was paid out the last week of December and is caught up. September and October payments are scheduled and the message talks about those (and why we were unable to stick to the original schedule).

ichbinbose - I'll DM you for your contact info as I'll need to look at your account if you don't think you're caught up through the August rewards mentioned above.

And Kevin, no pricing games here. We actually don't control prices at all for any products on the site, including Portal Select and Marketplace. It's all set by suppliers. I'll give you a call when I get a chance this week to touch base.

YIKES, was THAT a "don't do it message!" from Blackwire or what!? Just doesnt seem to be going well for Portal. I have no dog in the game but based on the responses, not looking like I want to. Maybe reputation defenders dot com needs a customer?

This conversation would likely go better with beer rather than coffee.

I jumped on Portal recently to create some proposals.  It is absolutely miserable to use now.  Every single thing I do either takes 15 to 20 seconds to save, or returns an error.  I have to constantly refresh to do anything.  For this we are being charged $50 per month?  I cannot in good conscience use the ordering system with this many issues putting together a simple proposal.

We've been battling a server cache issue for the last couple days. The good news, and the short of it, is that we know what's going on and the fixes have started rolling out. The second update is in about an hour, and the third piece I expect by this weekend. It's certainly not normal or expected behavior of the site and I'm monitoring it closely.

Since I like to give more info than most people care to hear, you can scroll down for a more technical description (aka, me geeking out)...


We use an elastic cache service for our servers. This allows us to scale cache with demand on the site. Recently, we noticed our cache service was getting pegged during periods of high demand/usage. And our usage has been growing. Our front end user interface consumes our own API service, so to investigate, we pulled all of our API call logs over the last few months. This is literally terabytes of data to sift through to identify the issue. It took several days just to get that data in a table that could be queried. We found a few things that we addressed, but the symptoms were still there.

So yesterday we built a load tester so we could re-create significant load on our test site. That's when we found that the server cache settings were not being set properly (it was ignoring our code requests). API connections were being held open indefinitely, so multiple simultaneous connections would pile up in our cache service and we'd hit our limit quickly during high demand. We're working with the service to find out why it ignored the correct settings from our code. When we manually changed the setting in the cache utility, we noticed an immediate improvement. Connections released quickly and the activity returned to normal during high demand periods. Next step (happening shortly) is to increase our overall simultaneous connection pool.

We also noticed that our API service is restarting periodically throughout the day, and we've tracked this to timeouts and high server loads. This is the third step that we're looking at next and I expect we'll have this resolved shortly.

Thanks for the update.  Still slow as of now.  Will try later on tonight to see if the updates fixed the lag on my end