Changes Made to Customers - What Are Companies, Employees and Sales Representatives
This page will explain the general concept of how overarching types of users on the shop will work.
We will be talking about two different companies in this page:
Ektek GmbH - This is your debitor, who is placing orders on a shop. Henk Becker is their initial admin.
Luxon GmbH - This is the company that runs the shop.
Clarification of terms
Company
In contrast to classic Shopware, you do not create individual private customers for each of your employees, but a commercial customer that serves as a central linking point for all your employees and can represent your company.
Before:
Ektek GmbH was a customer all your employees logged into before, with the same password and email.
After:
Ektek GmbH cannot be logged into anymore by your employees. Instead, they log into "employee" accounts, with their own emails and passwords, and Ektek GmbH continues to be the connection point where all your products and orders live.
Employee
The employee is an account that can be assigned to one or multiple companies. These are not created via the login screen in the store. Your company's administrators can manage and create those accounts to provide to your employees.
Before:
Your Ektek GmbH employee opens a new account on the shop with their email. You need to concatenate dozens of accounts' invoices later in the year.
After:
You, as an administrator for your company, Ektek GmbH, create individual accounts for your employees they can log into. All your orders and invoices that your employees create are in one place for you to access.
Sales Representative
The sales rep is a special type of account that has special permissions, such as creating and managing offers for customers or making purchases on behalf of customers.
Before:
You, as Luxon GmbH, had to give full shop admin access to anyone in your company you wanted to have the ability to create orders for customers, and there was no way to trace back who actually created the order.
After:
You, as Luxon GmbH, do not need to give full shop admin access to anyone in your company who is focused on sales tasks. Instead, you can create a sales representative for them, so they can handle all sales related tasks inside the shop directly. You also have the ability to understand who made changes for customers or created orders, which you previously didn't have.
Creating companies
You have a customer that wants to buy products from you. This customer is the company, Ektek GmbH.
The customer goes to the login screen and creates a new account for Ektek GmbH. As the store owner, you can specify in the admin whether new customers should be created exclusively as private customers (B2C) or business customers (B2B).
As soon as registration as a commercial customer has been completed, depending on the settings in your store, the creator will be asked to create a first admin employee. This can also be done automatically. Learn more about how this can be configured here.
It is important to understand that with B2Bsellers, commercial customers are treated as umbrellas that contain all employees you can log into. As such, password changes to the debitor (Ektek GmbH) are not affecting the initial admin (Henk Becker) that gets created.
Passwords must always be changed at employee level.
Creating employees
To create an employee, the administrator of the company logs in and goes to Company > Employees. From there, there is the option of creating employees manually, inviting them via a link or importing them via CSV.
Once employees have been created, they can make purchases for the company, view invoices, etc., depending on their authorizations.
To learn all about how to manage or create employees, see this article.
To learn more about all the things you can do as an employee, see this article.
Creating Sales Representatives
To create a sales rep, go to the admin under Customers > Sales agents.
There, you can create a sales agent by using the button on top of the page.
In order to learn more about what you can do as a sales rep inside the shop, see this article.
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