Can you have a wholesale AND Retail storefront?

[circlekstrings]

Hello again everyone, this might be a little off topic, but I was wondering if anyone out there has a store set up for multiple types of customers (i.e. wholesale vs retail).

Example, we sell guitar strings. we have our customer store front at http://www.circlekstrings.com/store which includes 5 quantity pricing levels

I would like to add (if possible) a new "store" for luthiers (guitar builders) who use our products as OEM items on the instruments. This site would require the user to set up an account with us, and when they log in they get a different range of prices. the problem I am finding is that our prices for luthiers are not 'a certain percentage' discount but a completely different pricing model so we cant simply use a percentage discount, or coupon.

I was messing around with quantity pricing and found that if we could offer certain individuals the "20+" pricing for even just one item, that would work perfectly.

Any thoughts on this? anyone doing something similar?

thanks in advance

[BFChris]

You might want to check out Lexiconn's wholesale module:

http://www.lexiconn.com/ecommerce/shopsite/wholesale-module.html

[Jim]

There isn't a way to give the 20+ pricing to just certain shoppers, if they don't order 20 they won't get that price.

The best solution would be to have a separate website just for wholesale customers and another for retail customers.

In a single website you could create a wholesale section by password protecting a subdirectory and place wholesale only pages in that subdirectory. You would then create separate products with wholesale prices and place those products on wholesale versions of your pages that you place in the wholesale subdirectory. (You would need to create the wholesale subdirectory outside of ShopSite since ShopSite doesn't allow creating directories. You would need to password protect it using an htaccess file on Unix type servers.) Once the subdirectory has been created you can have ShopSite generate the pages in that location by entering the path and filename in the "File name" field on the Pages > Edit Page Content screen. You would enter the filename like wholesale/pagename.html . With the pages created and in the password protected directory you would need to give your wholesale customers the password so they would be able to login and see those pages.

This does have a couple of drawbacks, 1. you have to create separate pages and products for wholesale and retail customers, however you would also have to do that if you had two separate stores. 2. Search would display all product in the store not just the wholesale or retail versions. As long as your search results product template only displayed links to the products (and not price) shoppers could click on the links to get details but only those who had the password would be able to see the wholesale pages.