AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I'm having trouble understanding the functionality of "Group Restrictions" on the PRODUCT admin page vs "Assign products to a group" on the GROUP admin page.

I would have thought these were just two different ways to accomplish the same function - to have a particular product available or NOT available to be viewed/purchased by users in a particular group - but it doesn't seem to work that way for me.

Example - Product "A" and User Group "X"
On the Groups admin page, product A is NOT assigned to Group X, and on the product configuration page for product A, Group Restrictions is NOT enabled. A user who is a member of Group X - and no other groups at all - CAN see product A when logged in. Since product A is NOT assigned to Group X on the Group admin page, I would think it should NOT be visible to member of Group X.

What am I missing?

Perhaps if you don't turn on the product's Group Restrictions setting, that means it is not restricted, regardless of what groups it is assigned to?

I think I figured it out:

Assigning a product to a group on the Groups admin page simply controls visibility of the ADD to CART button – a product not added to a User Group will not show an Add to Cart button for members of that group so it cannot be purchased. This has no effect on whether or not GUESTS can see the product (that is controlled by the Visibility setting on Product page).

Group Restrictions control on Product page controls visibility of the product among user groups. If group restriction is set, only those groups can SEE the product at all. If product is not assigned to that group on the Groups admin page, even though users in groups set here can SEE it, they still cannot BUY it b/c they will not see an Add to Cart button – must add product to the user group on Group admin page to activate the Add to Cart button.

The VISIBILITY setting on Product page controls whether or not GUESTS can see the product at all. UNLESS the product is Restricted to ANY user group – in that case, Guests will NOT see the product since Guests are not “in a group”. So in effect, Group Restrictions also controls visibility for GUESTS – since Guests are not “in a group”, if a product is restricted to ANY user group, then Guests will NOT see the product.

The "hole" this still leaves from a business logic perspective, is the ability to hide certain products from a user group WITHOUT hiding them from Guests (or other user groups)?

Consider this - product "Blue Fish" sells to consumers at $10 each. I want to create a Wholesale Fish group to which I will sell Blue Fish at $5 ea. I can do that fine by CLONING the Blue Fish product, and renaming the new product to "WHKLSL Blue Fish" and setting the price to $5. I can then restrict this new product to ONLY the Wholesale Fish users group, so no one else can see it (not users in other user groups, nor Guests browsing the site) - that's all good.

BUT... members of my Wholesale Fish group will still ALSO see the "regular" (consumer priced) Blue Fish product. Not the end of the world, but somewhat confusing... they don't need - or want - to see two separate Blue Fish products (one priced at consumer price and one priced at wholesale price). There should be a way to hide the consumer priced Blue Fish product from the Wholesale Fish users group without hiding it from non-registered Guests.

Any thoughts are appreciated!!

BUT... members of my Wholesale Fish group will still ALSO see the "regular" (consumer priced) Blue Fish product. Not the end of the world, but somewhat confusing... they don't need - or want - to see two separate Blue Fish products (one priced at consumer price and one priced at wholesale price). There should be a way to hide the consumer priced Blue Fish product from the Wholesale Fish users group without hiding it from non-registered Guests.

Looks like what you are suggesting is an exclude filter for specific groups. For example, the Blue Fish product can specify which group can't see or buy it or see it. At the moment we don't have this ability out of the box but I wonder if you can try to work around it by customization. If you update the code and start placing guest users into a specific group. Then for the Blue Fish product, you can choose all groups except the wholesale group. This will need you to create a new group and then have some code change website to automatically place guest users into that group.

I think I understand what you are suggesting, but wouldn't that work only for "guest users" that have made a PURCHASE without creating a user account (that's when they would be placed into a "guest group" - when they purchase a product - right?).

What about "anonymous" users - people just browsing the site that have not created any type of account or have never made a purchase - the "general public" - I need to be sure they can see the consumer-priced Blue Fish product.

Actually by asking to place guest user what I meant was an anonymous user. Any new user who reaches to the website, you put the account to some designated group.

If an anonymous person just browses my site, at that point I don't have an email address for them or know anything about them, how would they be placed in a group?

Are you saying that could be done with code so that whenever ANY anonymous person hits my site, the background code could automatically add that "person" to a group?

Have you tried the product specials? You can provide different prices for different user groups.

Thanks for replying.

The SPECIALS function does not fit for me because I have many VARIANTS of each product for which I want to offer different prices to different groups.

If the difference in price from one group to another was consistent for each variant, then I could use the MODIFY function in the Price column in the variant setup, but that is not the case - for one variant the wholesale price price may be 40% less than consumer price, and for another variant it may be 50%... neither the % or the $ amount is the same difference for all the variants of a particular product.

What I need is a way to set every variant price to one specific amount for one group, and another specific amount for another group.

So far, it looks like my best option is to create different products for the wholesale group, name them with "WHL-" as the first characters of the product name and SKU, then restrict those products to the Wholesale users group in the Product configuration so other groups cannot see them.

That part works fine, but the problem is that the Wholesale users group ALSO sees the "regular" (consumer priced" products as well which could be confusing to them (they could order the wrong product and pay a higher price & then complain).

I tried restricting the regular (consumer priced) products to a special CONSUMERS group I had created, but when I do that, anonymous users browsing the store (people that are not logged in to any group at all) cannot see those products - I don't want it so that someone HAS to create an account just to see our products.

There has GOT to be some way to accomplish this without extensive custom mods??