Multi store customer configuration - migrating sites to Magento

[SteveAtk]

Hi, I'm looking for some assistance

We run a number of retail and wholesale websites broken down by region so for example we have wholesale & retail in the UK and again in ES and another 10 or so countries.

Our current sites are running on very old, heavily modified oscommerce and opencart platforms and we are going to migrate into Magento CE

The setup I need is the following ideally...

3 customer databases or groups. One for each major accounting area within our business (SRL, SL, ROW)

Is it possible to have 3 distinct customer bases in the databases? I assume so using grouping and if so can we then apply sub-groups to those groups for wholesale & retail?

So the scenario that we want is....

1. Any customer from the SL customer data should be able to log onto the ES or PT websites but not any other site.

2. Any customer from the SRL customer data should be able to log onto the IT websites only

3. Everyone else should be able to log onto any of the other websites using the ROW customer records

Is this something that is possible? In the documentation it looks like a store can have it's own customer data or shall customer data globally with all sites, which isn't what we need.

I'm new to Magento but I assume I could just create a new field in the customer table to signify which of the 3 customer groups any customer belongs to and then override the login code with a custom module or am I over complicating things?

Thanks!

[Sinisa]

You can achieve fine-grained permissions by using this extension: https://github.com/Vinai/groupscatalog2

If you're using Magento Enterprise, that feature comes out-of-the-box.

Magento supports "Customer Groups", so you can easily create separate Customers by Customer Groups, and on that way you can control everything per customer group.