The Supplier Portal allows suppliers to interface to retailers from a common location. Retailers can send and receive information to the supplier portal for sharing, and suppliers can upload information once for all retailers and distributors.
The Portal itself can be used actively as a web based application, or statically as a way of sharing documents easily using automatic feeds. Using a portal means that you don't need to create a seperate connection for every retailer/supplier, just one connection each to the portal, saving time, effort and money.