Investigating Prestashop for pure B2B

[Brazzan]

Hi there!

 

I'm investigating platforms for a pure B2B business. I've looked at Presta 1.6 for a day or two now and I have a couple of issues that seems to be without solution as the platform sits now.

 

- In our business we have may different pricelists, in two categories. Normal pricelists per market, and customer specifik price lists.

 

- We also have customer specifik products, thats unique for the customer that we hold in stock.

 

- In many cases our customers has one company, but regional offices. Each of these regions has their own customer number, the same organisationnumber, but different delivery addresses and sometimes even different invoice addreses.

 

- There are sometimes multiple contact persons for each region that shop online with us. And there are also cases where the same contact person are connected to two different regions... and in a few cases even different companies with their own customer id.

 

 

Ex.

 

Company 1 INC in region x

- Contact person 1

- Contact person 2

 

Company 1 INC in region y

- Contact person 3

- Contact person 1

 

 

Company 2 INC in region a

- Contact person 4

- Contact person 2

 

 

Worth mentioning is that our business system is the core in our busines. The e-commerce platform is the external face for our customers. 

 

 

My eyes are starting to wander towards other solutions.

[robb]

Hey, 

First of all i want to say that PrestaShop is very versatile and you can tweak it to meet almost any demands.  

 

 

Customer specific prices. This can be achieved by putting customers in diffrent groups. (Go to Back-Office => Customers => Groups) 

 

Customer specific products. Same here, it can be achived by different groups where they have access to different categories. 

 

Can't they have more then one account per company? So the different regions are in the same Group but they don't share the same account. Therefor they will have the same products and prices but with different contact information. You can also add multiple addresses to one account. 

[Brazzan]

The problem with the last thing you wrote is that one person that's involved in different regions need to have different login credentials. To ask a customer to keep track of as much as 5-10 accounts is alot to ask. These people are buyers, and sometimes they are in charge of multiple offices supply. Also, have in mind that everything must be connected, so that orders from different persons in one regional office is connected to that offices customer number. 

[Brazzan]

I've re-looked at this and I still see no way to do this in Prestashop. I've considered to use one group per customer that need multiple logins for multiple personel. But that would result in an estimated 2 000 customer groups for the current customer stock our company has. I'm not sure that's even a good idea...

 

It feels like this is the only solution for handling our customer structure in Prestashop, and it would probably result in the mother of all adminastrative tasks to keep it running smooth.

[PhpMadman]

Hello. Can't you do one account. And the account name is firstname , lastname = Company, AB

And then use the addresses, and the contact person set the address that has his name?

[Brazzan]

The multiple logins for one company (customer) is not optional (that was the first thing I tried to change). Otherwize it would be a piece of cake. One customer, one login, and if that customer has a specific pricelist, they are put in a group with that pricelist connected to it.

[PhpMadman]

I read your post again. Now I understand what you want.

 

You can't manage this by default. Not without as you said, many many customer groups and so on...

 

You would need a custom made module.

 

I think the best approach would be to create accounts for each contact person.

And then using the module to assign that person to the companies / regions.

And the customer can choose what company / region they shopping for.

[Brazzan]

Yeah I've thought in those lines too. Though choosing this method would probably change alot of other things too. How pricelists are assigned, how the order data is saved and the functions for presenting correct order history, how customer specifik products are made visable for only certain customers and so on and so on. 

 

Seems like an awful fuzz for what is standard in many other platforms (though not open source.. Magento and OpenCart has the same limitations).

 

Thanks for your input!