WebSphere Commerce Enterprise

Organization and buyer administration flows (B2B)

In the B2B direct business model, each company that purchases from your store must have one or more registered users who are assigned the Buyer Administrator role. Buyer Administrators administer the company's organizations, and they manage the company's buyers, including assigning roles and approving new buyers who register. The Aurora starter store provides a series of self-serve pages for Buyer Administrators to do their work directly in the storefront, rather than using the Organization Administration Console.

The equivalent Buyer Administrator capabilities in the Organization Administration Console are still available, but the capabilities are duplicated in the storefront to create a simpler and more convenient customer experience.

In the following screen capture of the My Account sidebar, the area that is labeled 1 shows the Organizations section that gives Buyer Administrators access to the administration pages. The Organizations section is visible only to customers who are signed in to the store and who have the Buyer Administrator role.
Organizations section in the sidebar

By using the store pages in the Organizations section, Buyer Administrators can complete the following tasks, which they previously performed in the Organization Administration Console:

Tasks for Buyer Administrators in the Aurora starter store
Organization management
  • Search for organizations
  • Create organizations that are suborganizations of the top-level organization that the Seller Administrator creates
  • Edit organization details such as address, approval types, and available roles
Buyer management
  • Search for buyers
  • Create buyers and assign roles such as Buyer Approver or Organization Participant
  • Edit buyer details, such as the name, address, password, roles, and member groups
  • Enable and disable buyer user accounts
  • Approve or reject new buyer registrations

In addition to the tasks listed in the previous table, Buyer Administrators can also approve orders in the Aurora storefront, if the organization enables order approvals. Buyer Approvers can also approve orders. For more information, see Order approval flows.

The following site flow topics provide details about each of the pages in the Organizations section of the My Account sidebar: