in Magento, Programming, Web Development

Configuring Magento for Trade only

Magento never fails to amaze me in it’s flexibility and it’s ability to configure the site for almost any business objective. One popular choice might be a trade only site to use it as a platform for wholesalers or partners to purchase large quantities of goods.

trade

When thinking about this configuration usually you would want some of the below:

 

– Independent store per customer

– Customer can only access the catalog once logged in

– Remove registration or have approval only

– Prices only visible to logged in members

– Sell the same SKU to different customers at different prices

– Remove checkout payment option

– Restrict address and delivery address alterations

 

Independent store per customer

Magento does support multiple store’s per website, so a new store view can be set up per customer, but to get this to work as intended as Magento allows the customer to login to any store, which you may want to restrict. You can add a store attribute to the customer profile and then check this attribute upon login and redirect the customer to the correct site, no matter where they log in at.

Customer logged in Catalog

This is pretty straightforward again adding a check in the header to see if the customer is logged in, otherwise redirect to the login page.

Remove registration

You may want to disable registration if your using the API to update Magento or have an approval process , there is a free module on Magento Connect that allows approval. It’s also worth disabling persistent login in the configuration so there is only one login page to edit.

Prices only visible to logged in members

As above , if you wanted the site to remain accessible to the public but just hide the pricing, a simple customer session check will do the job.

Customer groups for different pricing

Supported out of the box, although if your running multiple stores this probably becomes redundant.

Remove checkout payment option

This is a little bit more tricky, and involves editing several files there’s a guide on doing just that here there are some changes needed for 1.9.1 though that aren’t covered in that article.

Restrict address and delivery address alterations

You will most likely want to restrict address changes as these are orders on account, here you can set the input/selects to disabled.

 

Thinking about starting a trade only Magento website and require a consultant? Please get in touch.

Write a Comment

Comment

  1. “– Sell the same SKU to different customers at different prices”

    How is this done? Do you recommend a specific module for this?

    • You can do this fairly easily by having customer groups which then allows group pricing (built in Magento feature)

  2. I am in Herts and looking for someone to help me upgrade and support my magento site and help me get it working properly, I have a spec but right now want to figure out if I can find someone to help – initially to improve the site, then to help build a plan for how I move things ahead