Customer Groups & Price Levels

[dynoJean]

I have set up 3 customer groups:

1) Retail (regular customers who buy products at our regular MSR price) at Price Level 1
2) Drop Ship Resellers (resellers of our products who get discounted price) at Price Level 2
3) Retailers (stores we wholesale to) at Price Level 3

Questions:
I have the store settings to Email Required and Password Required to checkout, so before a visitor logs in, I assume they're in the customer group called "None". Do they automatically get put into Group 1 if they log in? (I have Group 1 set to auto approve.)

A $45 product has options, some of which are $5 more. For Group 2, how do I set the price level for these options? I can change the level 2 price, but don't see where I can set the option price less than $5.

We only wholesale certain products, so do I check "hide on this level" (3) for all products Group 3 is not allowed to buy?

And, finally, where do go to approve people who sign up to be Group 2 or Group 3? (I do not have "auto approve" checked for those groups.

Or would promotions work better for what I'm trying to do for some of this?

If I sound confused, it's because I am.

[GonzaloGil]

Hi dynoJean,
Unless you assign a customer to a group, they are not assinged to a group.
You could have them register before they buy, then yes, but thats a bit crazy, you would have to have them go to the register page FIRST, then shop, then checkout.

Second question, options, if you have a product so complicated that the options themselves will vary from group to group, the only solution is going to be to create the item twice, and hide each item from their oposite groups.

The checkboxes work the following way, if you check ON the price level 1 for hide from this level, this means HIDE this product if the customer is on Level 1. So, what you are giong to want to do, is check the Level 1 hide box for all products that you only want the wholesale level to see.

As for the approving, when you go to edit a customer there's a drop down for enable/disabled. You can search for all disabled users to quickly find out who needs to be enabled.

Promotions would work for the pricing if and only if you can figure out a percentage that would work. ie. Wholesale users get 15% off the top, if thats the case, setup promotions instead of going through each and every product to change the price to -15%. Now if each product varies, promotions will not work, as you can't just say 15% this product but 10% of this one, and so forth. (You could but you would have to create a promotion for EACH product).

[dynoJean]

Just thought I'd post that the verson 2.1 upgrade has resolved this issue. My customer groups and promos work great now. Thank you