AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I am a long time customer of Able Commerce and I hold a multiple site license with your company. The only reason I have not upgraded up to this point is because of some of the rigid business logic that is built into Able. If we were able to solve this issue I would be more than willing to upgrade my multi site license. Here is my issue:

We sell about 90% business-2-business. Many of our customers have one main person who is responsible for placing multiple course orders (we sell training, both online, seminars and onsite training) for their company.

Able is set up to handle orders on an "individual" basis and we can’t see, to find a way to work around this. The basic problem is there is no way for one user to place orders for 2,3 or even 10 different people. For customers who order online training (about 50% of our clients) they are assigned a unique user ID and password through Able. We have customized our shop to send this information to our LMS, which adds the account, sends a confirmation email (containing the User Id and Password) to the customer and allows them to log in and begin their training.

What we need is for our customers to be able to set up a "Master Account" for the person who does the ordering. This person, after they create their account, could thereafter place multiple orders for our training courses (again, assigning ALL subsequent users a unique User ID and Password for each new order). Because of the business logic as well as the way Able stores cookies, we are barely able to “guide” them through the order process (we have tweaked our final checkout page to “wipe out” the current session cookie so they have the “fun” of going back through the ENTIRE order process (selecting the product, filling in ALL the company information fields, payment information and the NEW student name) so they can place yet another individual order. For people placing 10 orders, the process can take upwards of an hour or more and that’s IF they don’t register the same student for 2 or 3 courses BY MISTAKE because they forgot to hit the “register another student button (most people try to “shortcut” the process by clicking the Back button so they have all their fields filled in). As you can see this is QUITE frustrating for our customers ANY our CSR’s. If we could solve this issue you would have definitely have a multiple sale for Version 7.0

Is there ANY way this could be accomplished? Alternately, is this an upgrade you may consider for a future version?

We were able to do this in 5.5 by our reps starting out with ?ncp=1&nbp=1 in the url (You only need to use one, but I don't remember which one).
In Able 7, as long as your rep is not logged in (Click the logout button), orders can be placed for other people from the store side. The one snag in 7 is that the order confimation email doesn't include the password. To retrieve the password your rep would need to send it separately. 7 uses a one-way encryption method and a customer has to re-set a password or the merchant can re-set it.
You can also create a new user in the admin, then click to save and edit, then click create order. The only thing I find cumbersome is you have to do a search for a product to add it to an order, you can't navigate the category tree to find a product.