The dealer channel

The basic design decision of the dealer channel is this: no separate site was built for dealers. A dealer sees the corporate site everyone sees; the only difference is that prices are visible and they can open an order.

The reason is the one that recurs throughout this book: two catalogues drift apart sooner or later and raise the question of which one is right.

The price a dealer sees

The price comes from a pricelist rule tied to the dealer's tier. It is calculated from the list price; a dealer sees their own price and not anyone else's.

Products without a price have a separate path: they are not shown as 0.00 — they read "to be priced" and can still be added to a request. Showing zero would give the impression that they are free.

From request to order

Basket  →  Request  →  Review  →  Quotation  →  Signature  →  Order  →  Delivery  →  Invoice  →  Payment

A dealer's basket is directly a request. A request carries: lines and line notes, the dealer's own reference, the requested date, end-customer information, payment term and payment method preference.

In every state the request page shows the sentence "what comes next". From there the dealer can ask for a change or a cancellation — these are messages, not actions; the sales side makes the decision.

An approved request turns into a quotation. The dealer can confirm the order by signing the quotation in the portal. After the order, the four-step life cycle is followed on the same page: quotation, delivery, invoicing, payment.

Case

A single timeline for request and order

Situation

After a request turned into an order, correspondence piled up in two different places; nobody knew which sentence was where.

What was done

The comments of the request and of the order it became were merged into a single timeline. There is one reply box, and a message written there lands on the order.

Result

The dealer sees a single conversation. Internal notes do not enter this stream — three separate rules reject them.

Discount caps

The discount a dealer can use is limited by a cap, and the cap varies by the dealer's tier. The company has an absolute cap; no tier can go above it.

Notifications

• When a request is opened, a notification goes to the dealer's own sales team.
• When a decision is made on a request, the dealer is notified in their own language.
• When a price or stock question is answered, both the question and the answer appear on the page.

The account area

A dealer sees their requests, orders and invoices under /my. These pages use the system's portal shell and are dressed in the corporate site's visual language.

One basket

A dealer has a single basket, and that basket is the request itself. Products collected in the browser before logging in are moved into this basket on login; no item is lost and two different figures never appear in two different places. Two mechanisms giving two answers to the same question are worse than one.