One store for retail and one for trade or

[♥14steve14]

My business is growing which is good news, but I am facing a bit of a dilema.

 

We currently sell a whole range of products to retail customers through our website. We are expanding the business to sell to trade customers. These trade customers will be receiving a discount on all products. The products instead of being sold individually will be sold in prepackaged quantities for retail display.

 

Now our dilema. Do we install SPPC and then block some products from trade customers, and other products from retail customers, or do we start a new webstore for trade only customers. I know this will mean running two stores, with some identical products, and will probably mean double the work, but is it better, and is it easier to get the coding right.

 

What do others do, and what to coders and designers recommend. I just dont know which way to go.

 

I have a test site up and running with SPPC installed and have added ways of blocking products, but it is getting to the stage where thing might go wrong, and might be getting too complicated. I am a believer in keeping things simple.

[multimixer]

I would say SPPC + QPBPP, so you can have different minimum quantities and quantity blocks for each group, prices etc too of course.

 

You don't need to "hide" any products for quantity/pricing reasons, only if you don't want to show them for some reasons

[♥14steve14]

The trouble is that most of the products available to the trade are going to be in pack quantites, and these will not be available to retail customers, so hiding certian products will be a must. We also sell downloads to the public, and will sell printed packs to the trade.

 

I just cant make my mind up over the best way to achieve this.

[multimixer]

Are "pack quantities" not something that you could handle with QPBPP and SPPC?

 

You could say that

Retail: Min quan = 0 Order step = 0

Trade: min quan = 12 order step = 12

 

Trade people can order only in a "pack quantity" of 12 then

 

If you don't want to sell downloads at all to the trade, but the product itself is the same, you can modify the attributes (download) to show only for a specific group, in this case group 0 (=retail)

 

If the product won't exist at all for a specific group then yes, you need to hide it. There is no problem with that, since you have the customer_group in the session you can use it as you like, eg to show a different description for the same product to each group or anything

 

All in all, in the long term I think it's better to get the setup trouble now and have a peace in mind than to operate 2 stores

[burt]

Most definitely agree with having 1 store for both sets of clients.

 

A couple of weeks ago I turned away a customer who wanted to go down the route of having 2 separate shops;

why waste time and energy (and money!) with two shops when one does a better job.

[MrPhil]

Since the "products" are different between the two (single items vs. bulk packs, plus different pricing), my take on it would be to go with two separate stores and avoid any complications of heavily mangled code and leakage between the two customer sets. When you say "trade", I presume that's a.k.a. "wholesale"? Is customer tax treatment any different between the two (e.g., no state sales tax for wholesale)? Are shipping options different? Would trade/wholesale be by invitation or approval only? (e.g., need to show sales tax exemption certificate) I suspect that there are enough differences between your two sets of customers to warrant making two separate stores.

[multimixer]

This start getting a nice discussion :)

 

Some reasons for 1 store

 

In case you have 2 stores, what will you do if

 

- you "open" a 12pack of an item that is listed/stored in the trade DB and sell 1 of it in retail? You'll need to deduct 1 pack from the ade DB and add 11pcs to the retail DB, manually !

- a retail customer open a store himself and become a trade customer. What will yu do with his order history etc?

- you decide to create one more customer group "super trade" or something, will you open one more store for them?

 

Forget a minute about internet etc, how would you handle this offline, would you open 2 physical stores and warehouses?

[♥14steve14]

@@MrPhil

 

Trade is wholesale. I also like the idea of two stores. Keeping trade and retail seperate has its advantages, but also a few disadvantages, like the extra work. Trade accounts would need to be confirmed and approved first. Different newlewtters would need to be sent to the different customer bases. Taxes and delivery options would be the same, but we may offer free delivery to trade customers over a certian value. As we are mainly aiming this at the UK taxes will not be a problem.

 

@@multimixer

My accountant has suggested that if this were to come to fruition, I would be better having two seperate business, but they can be run from a single premises. How this would work i have no idea, as products will be bought in bulk, and then either sold to retail customers or packed inhouse for wholesale customers.

 

I am not too sure of exactly how much extra work will be required. Its only really a case of entering product details on which ever website and getting invoices from both sites.It would be possible to make both invoices different so it could be easy to see where they came from. Having two stores would allow each site to be set up to cater for the customer base. A wholesale site will be different to a retail site.

 

I have recently installed 2.3.3 to my server and have been playing with it. I have added SPPC and show/hide products for SPPC, and added a few products to see how this will work. Once its set up it may save time, but it looks like a lot of work to set up. I now have to figure out a way of making a difference when creating a retail or wholesale account as the required information is different, and both are handled differently. For a non coder like me, this may be too hard.

 

Thanks for the comments so far.

[♥14steve14]

Have decided, after speaking to my accountant to use two sites. It looks a lot easier, and should not take much more administration. It will certainly be easier to code.

 

Thanks to those who voiced an opinion, it was much appreciated. Now to start again with 2.3.3 and get the first site right, then copy across as second site before final additions.