B2B - wanting to set up accounts for retail store customers but don't know how

[PalladiumBooks]

My company has been using Miva Merchant 9 for a while now for sales direct to retail customers with great success. We also wholesale our products to stores around the country, usually through distributors. The market is changing however, and we are being approached by more and more stores wanting to get our products directly from us without the distributor middle-man.

So two questions:

1) I know that Merchant 9 allows you to set up customer accounts with different pricing levels, so that when we set up a new store we can charge them wholesale instead or retail prices. But I can't find information on how to do this set up. Can anyone point me toward directions or a tutorial on how to get this done please?

2) Will there be any additional fees for having two different pricing levels? Or maybe three levels (we're looking at doing a third level for long-time retail store customers)?

Thanks.

[ids]

I've done quite a bit of this while integrating stores. I even have a module specific to wholesale scenarios. If you're on the recent Miva version and the details you supply, I think this can be done with Price groups and Availability groups and maybe the use of volume pricing to enhance your pricing structures.

Scott

[oliverands]

I've been doing this for years. We have fixed retail and wholesale pricing on all our products--which makes the implementation pretty simple. I put the retail price in the Price field for the product and wholesale price in the Cost field. I have a price group called "Wholesale" that has pricing set to cost. When I create an account for a new wholesale customer, I assign them to this price group. Once they log into their account, they see pricing using the Cost field value. You can get as complicated as you want with the pricing groups--setting up different pricing groups with different discount percentages from retail. You can also use the availability group to only show certain products to wholesale customers. All this is very easy to set up.

I get a little more complicated with some Toolkit functions on certain pages to display messaging or skip messaging for wholesale customers. But the pricing implementation part is super easy to do.

[mikey]

You should be able to do this with the Price/Availability Groups.

Now depending on how your pricing structure works will determine if they are enough plus how complex the setup will be.

We are planning on rolling out wholesale pricing which is a clone of how we use Price/Availability Groups now but with a different starting prices.