Hello,
Rookie here and really struggling how to set the funcationality of this site up. Let me explain.
I own a small business in which we manufacture products and sell through retail and wholesale distribution channels.
I have done a lot of research on how to accomplish setting up a retail/wholesale site with Magento, with no real solution that fits my needs (including the addition of 3rd party extensions).
So, we have customers that are classified as follows: retail, wholesale 1, wholesale 2, wholesale 3, and wholesale 4. Each of these generally receiving a diffent discount per product category or per product. Here are some specifics.
1. Each customer group will have quantity break discounts i.e. 1-10, 11-25, 26-100, etc...But, the discount that one group receives for a particular product for each quantity break will be differnt than that of any other customer group.
2. Most of our products offer several product options. The options may or may not cause the price to go up or down. The problem that I see with Magento 'out of the box' is that any discounts are not applied to product options. Rather, they are applied to the list price and then the product options fees are added/subracted to that value. The problem is that this does not take into account the discount given to that customer group for those products. For example, if there is an option for 'large' and is a +$5 adder to list price for my retail customers, my wholesale 1, 2, 3, 4 groups are also getting the same $5 adder for this option. This option(s) should be discounted for the particular group to which they belong.
3. Retail pricing will show for anyone surfing or logged in as a retail customer. If a wholesale customer is logged in, they will see only the pricing for which group they belong.
Additional thoughts.
- I had considered setting up a retail store which will allow anyone to purchase at retail prices. When logged in as a wholesale customer, it would be more of a 'quote' or 'pre-order' system. They would enter all the items and quanities into their cart at 100% discount. It would go into a 'pending' state until we responded back with firm pricing. Not sure I like this.
- I also have considered setting up multiple sites i.e. one for retail, one for wholesale 1, one for wholesale 2, etc. etc.
But, I do not want to recreate the site, nor the product database. Is there a way to recreate a new site for each customer group and then only edit the prices of each product for those sites? Share the product database?
We also have some customers who receive 'special' pricing on particular products. Not sure how to handle this. It would be the ultimate if we could go in, setup a new wholesale distributor for a group level. All of the product prices would reflect that group level pricing. If there were a special price, we would be able to setup that special price for that product for a particular customer.
It just seems very simple, but yet it is very complex. Setup list prices for each product+options. Discounts for each group based on group membership and quanity level ((product price+options charges) X (1-discount)). Then as mentioned above, the ultimate would be able to setup a specific price on a product/option for a particular cusotmer.
Any ideas? I even considered just going back to a simple brochure site with no ecommerce, but that does not seem to be the right thing to do in this age of business/internet.
Thanks for any comments/suggestions.
Sincerely,
Mike
