Preparing your product data for the portal
There are a few things to consider when planning for your portal implementation.
Product Availability on the Portal
First, do you want all of your active products to be available to all customers on the portal? If so, then you don’t need to do anything special for the product availability. If you have special requirements, follow one of the instructions below.
All customers have access to the same subset of your products
If you want only a subset of products to be available on the portal but it will be the same products for EVERY customer, you will need to mark the products somehow.
This is typically done by checking the Available On Web that is right next to the Active checkbox on the product screen. If you use this field for a different purpose or do not have this field on your screen, you can also use any other Acctivate field OR create a custom field for use.
NOTE: the field that you use to specify that a is to be available on the portal MUST be a checkbox type field. The awesome support staff at Alterity can help if you need assistance with selecting or setting up a custom field.
Limit access to products to some customers only
If you want some customers to have access to all products but some customers only see limited products, or if you want all customers to only see some products but they are different for each customer, then you can still make this work by utilizing the Acctivate price codes.
Nothing special needs to be done for the customers that will have access to all products that are available on the portal.
But for customers that you want to restrict products, you will need to do three things:
- In Acctivate, you will assign a Default Price Code to the customer.
- Still in Acctivate, you will add the above Price Code to the prices tab of each product that you want the customer to have access to.
- Now in the Portal admin, you will check a box that says ‘Restrict Products’ when adding the user to the portal. The customer will only see products that have a price code matching their Default Price Code.
Special Prices
The portal was designed to handle all of the pricing configurations available to you in the portal. But due to the ‘customer facing’ nature of the portal, you may have to set up the pricing different than you do for use inside of Acctivate. This is because Acctivate, you can give a customer any price you want by manually selecting a price code. In the portal, the prices a specific customer gets must be pre-defined so that the software knows what price the customer can get.
This is done in one of a few ways:
Using Price Codes
The most common way to give different prices to different customers is through the use of price codes. You can assign a Default Price Code to a customer, and then add that price code to any product that you want to assign a special price. The portal will then give that customer the price from their default price code for any product that has that price code added. They will receive the List Price for any other product they order.
Using Customer or Contract Pricing
You can also assign special prices for a single customer for some or all products by using contract pricing. From the Prices tab on the customer screen, you can add a special price and the portal will use this price for the customer on specified products or on all products.
Using Category Pricing
The portal also works with price codes set up at the category level when products are set as ‘Price By Category’. This allows you to price an entire category with a Cost Plus or List Minus percentage.
Product Images
The portal will use the image that is uploaded to a product in the Specs tab on an Acctivate product. This is the image that you see on the product, not the External Document link.
If you want to show product images in the portal but do not have them added to Acctivate already, you will need to do so before images will be used on the portal.
The portal will work with almost any image size and dimensions (with the exception of overly large files). But for the best user experience, it is best to use images with the same ratio for every product.