How online ordering works CSBIportadmin

Pre-login functionality

Visitors to your portal can access some pages without being registered or logged in. For example, they can browse your catalog and add items to the cart. Items not yet purchased can remain in the cart from prior visits in pre-login mode. The cart is identified by use of a cookie placed on the user’s computer. Users can update this cart as needed. At this point, the cart is an estimate in the back office.

If the user logs in, the user login ID and the customer number associated with the user is updated on the pre-login cart, the cookie is cleared, and the cart is considered a post-login cart. If the user returns to the portal in pre-login mode, the cart will be empty. But if they log in, the unplaced post-login estimate, identified by their user ID and customer number, will be displayed in the cart.

If the user’s browser is not set to accept cookies, any items added to the cart in pre-login mode are visible only during the current session, unless the user logs in. Upon login, the pre-login cart becomes a post-login cart.

It is possible for a user to have both a pre-login and a post-login cart. In this case, when the user logs in, the pre-login cart is copied to the post-login cart, leaving only the post-login cart. The user can see their post-login cart on return visits after logging in. Estimation of shipping charges is available in pre-login mode, however estimation of taxes cannot occur until a user has logged in.

Note: Back office users can purge older unplaced orders by removing order line items from an order one at a time.

User registration and login

B2C users who have not yet registered are required to do so on the Place Order page prior to submitting an order. The user is prompted to enter a user name, password, email address, shipping information, and billing information. A customer record, customer address record, and customer user name record are added in the back office. The records are created in every site in the Customer Portal site group. Tax codes are added by default, if configured. The customer number is added to the order.

B2B users will already have been registered by a back office user.

Both B2C and B2B users must log in prior to submitting an order.

See User account requirements for more information about B2B and B2C users.

Item pricing

When you set up the portals to display item prices, they are displayed on the Customer and Reseller portals' Products, Product Details, Featured Products, Top Sellers, Contract Order, and Place Order pages.

These terms are important for understanding how item pricing works:

Unit Price: The price for purchasing a quantity of one of an item.
Pricing Options: Special prices based on purchased quantities (break quantities) and pricing from other sites.
Pre-Calculated Price: Prices generated using the Portal Pricing Pre-Activation utility and stored in a batch table for use on the portal.
Live Price: Real-time prices.
List Price: An item's generic price for a quantity of one. This prices comes from the Item Pricing form in the item's portal pricing site. On that form, the list price is the Price Break, break quantity 1 price, if it exists. If not, list price is the Unit Price 1 price.
Customer-Specific Price: The customer's price for a single item, which can come from a customer contract, pricing formula, or the list price minus the customer/item discount.

The prices that are used on the portals, list or customer-specific, are based on selected pricing rules. Each item can also have pricing options, if they exist.

Before you set up item pricing, consider whether you prefer to use real-time pricing (live), pre-calculated (batch) pricing, or a combination of these. In general, pre-calculated pricing takes time for the portal administrator to calculate, approve, and activate using back office forms, but once the prices are ready and stored in the batch table, retrieval for display on the portal is fast. Live pricing requires slightly more compute resources at runtime to calculate prices for display, but avoids the need to run the pre-calculation utility.

Note: Live pricing makes prices immediately available on the portal. Live pricing should be used if you have extremely large numbers of items, customers, and/or currencies exposed to the portal, because the pre-calculation utility may not complete in a reasonable amount of time in this environment. We recommend that you run a pricing test with the utility, to see if pre-calculation is a suitable option for your business. See Activating prices.

We provide a parameter for displaying prices only upon request. If this parameter is selected, then for live pricing, the system does not have to calculate prices for all items on a portal page. Instead, when a portal user finds an item for which they would like to see the price, they click a View Price option, and it is calculated at that time.

We also provide pricing display rules, so you can specify what type of prices to display: generic, customer-specific, or a combination of these.

If no price is available for an item, the item is still shown on the portal but cannot be added to the cart.

About pricing options

Pricing options for B2B users are created for an item when you select Enable Portal Pricing on the Items form in a site other than the item's default pricing site (which indicates that more than one site is configured to sell the item) and/or when any applicable break quantity prices exist on the Item Pricing form in the item's default pricing site.

Pricing options for B2C users are created only when applicable break quantity prices exist on the Item Pricing form in the item's default pricing site.

Before logging in to the portal, both B2B and B2C users can see break quantity pricing options from the default pricing site.

After logging in to the portal, B2C users pricing options are the same, but B2B users pricing options now include prices coming from customer contracts, pricing formulas, generic pricing minus customer/item discounts, and multiple site pricing of the item.

Other pricing site rules for B2C and B2B users are described in this table:


B2B	B2C	Rule
X	X	On portal pages used to add an item to an order—for example, Products, Product Details, and Contract Orders— customers see pricing from the item's default pricing site.
X	X	When customers add items to the cart from the above-mentioned portal pages, the order line ship site is set to the default pricing site.
X	X	On the Product Details page, customers see available quantity from the default pricing site.
	X	On the Pricing Options form, customers see per-site pricing.
	X	On the Pricing Options form, customers see available quantity per pricing site.
	X	On the Pricing Options form, customers can add items to the cart from the pricing site with the best available price.

When pricing options exist for an item, that item's price is displayed with a star next to it on the portal, and the price can be clicked to view the options.

Submitting orders

After all desired items are added to an order, portal users go to the Place Order page to verify and edit order details (and register and log in, if they haven’t already). B2B users must select a payment method. B2C users can pay only by credit card, so they are not prompted for a payment method. If you do not provide the credit card interface for your portal, B2C users must call you to complete their order.

After all required data has been entered, the estimate order is copied to a customer order in the back office with a status of Planned. This allows taxes to be added. Tax, shipping, and order totals are calculated and displayed to the user. The order estimate status is changed to History.

After the user clicks Submit, the order status is changed to Ordered. An order confirmation page is displayed and an order verification report is emailed to the user.

Order status and shipping confirmation

All portal users have access to the Order Status page after they are signed in to the portal. On this page, they can verify the status of their orders and view order tracking information. Portal users who are signed up to receive order shipping alerts are notified by email when all or part of their orders have shipped.

Shipping, invoice, and payment application

Standard processing is used for shipping, invoicing, and payment application. For credit card payments, the Credit Card Interface is used to apply the payment to related invoices.

Reording items

Customers can use a Buy Again feature on the Order Status page to easily reorder one or more items from an existing order. Order information is copied for the user, and they can make some adjustments and then submit the order. However, this functionality is not provided in these cases:

The item is no longer active for the portal, which is determined by the Active For Customer Portal setting on the Items form.
The item’s ship-from site is not the portal primary site.
The item is configurable and its ship-from site is not the portal primary site.
The item is on an order for which the originating site is not the portal primary site. This can happen if the order was placed in the back office instead of on the portal.

If the item is still available on the portal but cannot be reordered by using the Buy Again feature, a Click here to buy this item again link is displayed on the Order Status page. The link opens the Product Details page, where the user can order the item again.

If the item can no longer be ordered on the portal, a Contact us to buy this item again message is displayed, along with your company email address, if one has been provided. See Providing your company contact information.