All of your B2B users will be assigned to a group. You can create multiple groups and they will determine certain settings for all users that have been assigned to it. The most common settings involve the following:

• What type of payments they can make (on account, by credit card)
• Whether or not they can see your stock levels
• Allowing them to add/modify ship-to and billing addresses
• Giving them access to see all their ERP order/transactional history
• Granting access to all or specific categories

Assigning users to groups allows you to control areas of your customer’s experience and restrict them where necessary. It is not always necessary to create multiple groups either if your customers all fit under same settings, this is not uncommon.

Examples

Example 01:
A company has two types of customers for their webstore; ones they allow the choice of either paying on account or by credit card and ones that are only allowed to pay by credit card only. This company would set up two user groups with that difference applied and all other settings the same.

Example 02:
The majority of an appliance company’s customers are based on the east coast of North America and has a handful on the west coast. They can’t ship larger items like refrigerators to the west and would therefore like to disable that webstore category for those customers. They would create two user groups; the first with access to all categories and the second with categories like Refrigerators disabled. Those disabled categories will simply be hidden for that user group and not appear in the webstore for them.

They’d then assign all their east coast customers to the first group and west coast to the second group.