What is a customer group?
A customer group is usually a grouping of several customers that makes it easier to set prices for many customers at once. For example, you can divide your customers into 3 groups called A, B, and C. The A group can be enterprise customers who receive a larger discount of 20% off the recommended price. B gets a 10% discount, and C gets a 5% discount.
Customer Groups from ERP
B2B pricing is often handled by the ERP system, which is excellent at this because ERP can manage prices in many different ways and is not limited only to customer groups.
The challenge is therefore to transfer the customer group structure to the webshop, which must function in much the same way.
In the ERP system, you typically work with discount percentages. This means that for customer group A, they get a 20% discount on product D. The ERP system therefore does not show the actual price for the item until it is placed on an order for the customer.
The challenge for many is to be able to pull customer groups and discounts into the webshop and show the correct sales price for the item specifically for the logged-in customer. Therefore, many B2B webshops do not show the sales price to the customer at all until an order has been created.
Customer Groups via Indexed PIM
The PIM system has direct support for creating customers and linking them to a customer group. This makes it possible via price rules to give all products, or a filtered selection of products, a specific discount for a given customer group. This can be managed either directly in PIM or via integration with ERP systems such as Business Central, Navision, and Visma.net.
Customer Groups on WooCommerce
A webshop platform like WooCommerce does not have standard support for customer groups as it primarily addresses B2C, which is more simply structured.
To get customer group support, you can install a plugin like Wholesale Prices, which provides this functionality. There is both a free and a paid version.
Customer Group Integration between WooCommerce and Business Central
Via Indexed PIM, it is possible to synchronize customers and customer groups between Business Central and WooCommerce via the Wholesale Prices plugin.
It works as follows:
- Customers are created on the webshop when they are tagged for the webshop.
- Customer groups are transferred and created on the webshop and linked to the created customers.
- Products are created from BC and transferred ongoingly to the webshop.
- Price lists with recommended prices are updated on products, and discounts are created in PIM so that customer prices are calculated and become available on the webshop when customers are logged in.