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Default Assortments

Scott Forsyth Dynamicweb Employee
Scott Forsyth
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It would be nice with assortments to have an option for a "Default" assortment. Right now there is an "Anonymous" option, but once someone logs in they have to be specifically assigned to an assortment. Otherwise they aren't assigned to any assortment and they don't see any products.

What I would like to have is the ability to set a default assortment. And if they are assigned specifically to another assortment, then they will use that one, otherwise they will use the default assortment.

The typical use case is to have different customers with different levels of access. There would be something like: standard customers, dealers, full access dealers. All users should see the standard products. Dealers should see some some more products. And full access dealers should see all products.

So I would like to assign dealers to the dealer assortment and full access dealers to the full access dealer assortment. And all other users will use the default assortment. 

This way when a new account is created, we don't have to keep track of adding them to an assortment. They only need to be specifically added if they have special access.

The other use case is the other way around. Some accounts don't want to see all products. So the default is to show all products, but some accounts will have a limited catalog. This can also be achieved with a default assortment.

 


Replies

 
Nicolai Pedersen
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It could become even more complicated to explain why users see what they do...

You could have a group in user management "Default assortment" that users could be member of when they create a profile - and once they are converted to another assortment, remove them from this group. That will also give you the flexibility to have them see both the "default" and specialized assortments if needed.

NP

 
Scott Forsyth Dynamicweb Employee
Scott Forsyth
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Hi Nicolai,

That's what I do now. The issue is that users can be created by A) setting up an account, B) from integration, or C) manually created by the customer in the backend. So there are so many ways to set them up that it's easy to forget to add them to a default assortment group. Since they should be added to that group 100% of the time by default, it would be so much nicer for there to be a default assortment.

The other issue is in integration where we can't just set the default assortment group for the integration because when accounts are in another assortment, they have to be removed from the default assortment group. But the decision to give a customer a custom assortment isn't backed by the ERP. So we can't tell in the integration step which group to place them in.

This means that we have the following situations:

  • Online signups. Default to default assortment group (that's easy)
  • Integration. We don't know in the ERP if they will have a custom assortment, so we can't add to the default assortment group (or they will be in two assortments). This means that we have a to have a regularly scheduled stored procedure set to add all users to the default assortment if they aren't in any other assortment.
  • Created manually in the backend. The customer's staff need to remember to always add them to the default assortment group. We can't piggy back off of another group since some accounts shouldn't be in the default assortment if they have a custom assortment. 

I've only used assortments on 3 sites so far, but all of them run into this same issue. All of this complexity goes away if there is a default assortment. Then we only assign users to their custom assorment if they have one, and all others will get the default assortment.

An alternative is to support smart lists (if there isn't a noticable performance hit) as long as it is supported for assortments and I can create a smart list based on a user not being in some other groups.

Scott