Different types of users

[deverill]

Hi gang,
I wanted to ask your collective opinion about something. We are moving from AC5.5 to AC7 and just starting the process. Currently we have 2 stores with identical inventory. One is for the general public. The other is for our vendors who get special prices. We let them log in with a custom script and set them into the appropriate pricing group based on that login.

In going to 7 it occurs to me that we should be able to set the public store up at a web address with no login and no allow_anonymous turned on. For the vendors it may be possible to send them to that same address /vendors which gives them the login script we modify similarly to what we have now. It will require some extra checks to see if they were logged in when they started that they are still logged in when they get to the basket and some way to turn off allow_anon, but it's perhaps not that much work considering what we have now and what is involved with 2 stores.

My question is, if you were to do this would you set up 2 separate store and deal with the headaches of keeping the inventories in Sync or would you make mods to allow it to be just one store with different entry paths as I've described above?

I have seen the great postings by Rick Morris (Brewhaus) under the title "Running multiple stores from on database" and that may indeed come in handy but I'm wondering about multiple stores versus one store right now.

Thanks!

[mazhar]

Well AbleCommerce 7 do provide special pricing for groups so one possible solution could be to use only single store and put the user accounts for vendor in certain user groups and finally adjusting the price level for each product according to groups. The benefits of this approach could be the less maintenance as compared to maintain two stores.