What is your third biggest B2B eCommerce Challenge? Multiple Users

In large business-to-business (B2B) transactions, it’s typical for a business customer to have multiple users making purchases. A lousy, very unsecured solution to this problem is to create one account for the customer and then expect all their users to share that same username/password. Instead, a better solution is to associate multiple eCommerce accounts with one customer accounts.

Let’s imagine that you sell building materials to construction companies, and your construction company customers are buying materials for multiple jobs. However, the construction company’s account should be keeping record of the purchases in the ERP, and each purchase should be affiliated with the appropriate project for proper billing, costing, etc. The project managers for those jobs may need to buy materials for each of their individual projects. Instead of calling their headquarters to place orders, it would be much more convenient and efficient to allow them to log into your eCommerce site and purchase the materials they need for their one job.

The xTupleCommerce system allows business customers (in this example, the construction company) to instruct each project manager to create an account with the eCommerce site. Then each of those user accounts would be associated with the one customer account in the xTuple ERP.

Additionally — for superior project controls — the construction company could manage which jobs each project manager could ship to. For instance, if Project Manager One is managing Job One, and Project Manager Two is managing Job Two, they could only purchase items to be delivered to their individual jobs.

Again, the construction company’s account would save all the sales order records in the ERP. This is incredibly efficient for both you and your customer when it comes to reporting, purchasing management, and eliminating time on the phone placing orders.

As I promised, this is the next in a series of blog posts that introduces you to the xTupleCommerce system. Look for more upcoming information, and please don’t hesitate to contact me and the xTuple Web Services Group (WSG) team with questions.

My last post in the series was: What is your second biggest B2B eCommerce Challenge? Multiple Ship Tos

Look for our YouTube Webinars on eCommerce and eCommerce tutorials on xTuple University.