Customer Groups

Customer groups have two basic uses.

·      They allow you to apply different sets of prices for different groups of customers.

·      They allow you to customize your store so that different customer groups see different products.

Creating A Customer Group

For details on creating customer accounts, please see Customer Account Overview.

Go to 'Marketing | Customer Groups' or press the  button on the toolbar.

In the 'Customer Groups' area on the left, click 'New' to enter a new group name in the field provided.

Click 'Remove' to remove the currently selected group name from the list. You can remove a customer group at any time unless it is assigned to a customer account.

There is a default customer group called 'Retail', which you can rename but cannot delete. This is the group on which any others you create will be based. It is also the customer group for all the non logged-in shoppers at your site.

In the 'Associated Accounts' list, you will see all customer accounts that are in this group.

In the 'All Accounts' list, you will see all customer accounts. Highlight an account name and click '<' to add it to the current group. Use '>' to remove an account from the group. If you cannot see the account you want, try using the 'Search'. Click 'Find' to start the search, and click 'Next' to go to the next found account in the list.

Editing The Amount Of Discount

Go to 'Marketing | Discounts and Surcharges Settings| Customer Pricing' menu to edit discount applied to the customer groups within Actinic.

Select the group you want to edit, and then use the 'Add', 'Multiply By' or 'Divide By' radio buttons to select the price structure you require. A multiplication factor of 0.9 will give a 10% discount; an addition factor of 5 will give a £5 mark-up. A negative amount in the Add field indicates a fixed price reduction on all products.

The 'Prices' Grid

Double-click on any product and go to the 'Prices' tab, or look at a component and go to the 'Prices' area.

This grid allows you to manually define how customer groups will affect each product in your online store, both item terms of price and whether the product is visible to the customer. It lists all the customer groups you have defined in 'Marketing | Customer Groups' and shows how much each product will cost within those groups.

The relevant settings within this grid are as follows:

Field	Meaning
Price	This shows how much this product will cost within this customer group. By default your customer groups will have a read-only price as they are being automatically generated.
Generated	De-selecting this will allow you to edit how much this product costs within this customer group.
Enabled	When you de-select this option for the 'Retail' row, this prevents the product from being ordered by retail customers. It does this by replacing the add to cart button with a message saying 'This product is only available to registered customers'. When you de-select this option for both Retail and also a customer group, this causes a 'This product is currently unavailable' message to appear in place of the add to cart button for both retail and logged in customers (who are members of this customer group). When you de-select this option for a customer group (not Retail) and leave it selected for 'Retail', then this will mean a customer within that customer group will be forced to pay the retail price.
Product Visible	De-select this box if you want the product to be totally hidden from the current customer group.
Customer Message	Enter a short message that will only be displayed to customers within the current customer group. This can be used to provide a targeted message to specific customers about the prices they are paying. This is especially useful when communicating information about component pricing (see What Are Components?) as this is not automatically shown online.