Organization and buyer administration flows (B2B)

In the B2B business model, each company that purchases from your store must have one or more registered users who are assigned the Buyer Administrator role. You can also assign the Buyer Approver role to users. The B2B Reference Store application (Sapphire) provides a link to the Management Center for Buyer Administrators and Buyer Approvers to complete the tasks that are assigned to them.

Buyer Administrators administer their own company's organizations and complete tasks such as changing contact details of organization. They also create users and assign roles such as Buyer Administrator, Buyer Approver or Buyer to the users. The Buyer Administrator also has approval capabilities, they can approve users who register as Buyers and they can also approve orders.

The Buyer Approver can only approve orders.

During organization setup, order approvals and contracts can be configured to set the criteria that determines which orders require approval. When order approvals are enabled, a Buyer Approver or Buyer Administrator must approve orders that exceed the order total limit that is specified in the contract before orders are submitted for processing.

The options that appear under the Administrative Tools menu in the B2B Reference Store application differ based on the role assigned to the user.

Note:

The React Stores support mobile devices. However, the Management Center UI is not optimized for mobile devices. When users access the Management Center from the stores using mobile devices, the Management Center might not display correctly.

Prerequisites

Consider the following points about managing organizations and buyers from the B2B React Store application:

The implementation for managing organizations and buyers from the B2B Reference Store application is provided as a reference for you to develop the feature in your React Store application. You can also develop your own custom UI with more complex features for managing organizations and buyers.
You must have the required permissions to access Management Center and to administer buyers or approve orders. For more information, see Management Center roles and access in Management Center for HCL Commerce.

For more information, see Organizations and Approvals.

Limitations

When a user logs in to the store, the user can access the Management Center administrative tools from the store if the user has the required permissions. If the same user logs in to the Management Center from another browser tab or window, this action terminates the same user's session in the store. When the user returns to the store UI, the user must log into the store again.

To avoid such issues, you can consider blocking access to the Management Center host/port in production live environments for buyer administrators or buyer approvers.

Managing organizations and buyers

To manage organizations and buyers, go to My Account > Administrative Tools in the B2B Reference Store application.

Click Organizations and Buyers to view information about organizations and buyers that you can administer.
- Click New to open the Management Center and add a new organization or buyer.
- Click the Login ID for a buyer to view the buyer details in Management Center.
- Click the cross icon to delete a buyer.
Click Buyer Registration Approval to view information about buyers.
- Click the Requester name to open the approval request in Management Center.

Approving buyers and orders

To manage organizations and buyers, go to My Account > Administrative Tools in the B2B Reference Store application.

Click Buyers and Order Approval to view information about buyers and orders that need your approval.
- Click the Requester name to open the approval request in Management Center.
- Click the Order name to open the approval request in Management Center.