Contracts enable a customer organization to purchase products from a store or a group of stores at a specified price for a specified period of time under specific conditions. WebSphere Commerce provides the ability to record and deploy contracts that have been negotiated. Use the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to manage contracts, for example, creating, changing, deploying, suspending, resuming, and unlocking contracts.
A contract consists of the following elements:
- Profile
- The contract profile contains the identifying information for the contract. This information includes a unique name for the contract, a short description, and a time period for which the contract is valid.
- Participants
- Contract participants are the organizations that take part in the contract. There is a buyer organization, a seller organization, and contacts at both organizations.Notes:
- When you specify an organization as a buyer participant, any user who is a member of that organization is entitled to the contract. Your direct parent organization does not have to be the buyer participant. In addition, if there are child organizations under the organization you have chosen, you do not have to explicitly select child organizations; the child organizations will be entitled to the contract and be participants of it.
- Contracts cannot be entitled to a customer segment or an implicit group based on dynamic conditions. Only customer groups that have explicit members listed can be specified as a customer group in a contract. With a B2B contract, you know precisely which members of an organization or members of a group. are entitled to the contract. Therefore, contracts can be entitled to an explicit member group; that is, a member group where individual members are directly assigned to the group.
To create an explicit member group, run the following SQL commands:
insert into member values (-10000, 'G', null) insert into mbrgrp (mbrgrp_id, owner_id, mbrgrpname) values (-10000, -2001, 'MyCustomerMemberGroup')
insert into mbrgrpusg values (-1, -10000, null)where MyCustomerMemberGroup is the name of the member group you want to create
For this member group to display in the Available customer groups list on the Contract Customers page, after you have created the explicit member group, use the Organization Administration Console to assign users to that member group, as follows:
- Open the Organization Administration Console using a Seller Administrator ID.
- From the Access Management menu, click Users. A list of users for the site displays.
- Select the check box next to the user that you want to work with and click Member Groups. The Include dialog opens.
- From the Available member groups list, select the group that you created above and click Add. The group moves from the Available member groups list to the Selected member groups list.
- Click OK to assign the member group for the user.
- Terms and conditions
- Contract terms and conditions are the rules that cover the actual implementation of the contract. Contract terms and conditions cover such information as product pricing, returns and refunds, payment, shipping, billing, and order approval.
- Attachments
- Contract attachments cover any information not covered by the previous elements such as file attachments that provide additional information about the contract and any general remarks about the contract. WebSphere Commerce stores Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) for contract attachments, not the actual attachments.
- Reference
- A contract can refer to another contract to share its terms and conditions. For example, contract A can refer to contract B. Thus, a buyer who is entitled to contract A will be entitled to all the terms and conditions from contract A, as well as to all the terms and conditions in contract B.
All contracts are associated with business accounts. Contracts can not be created for customers you have not created an account for.
Different items in a single order may be purchased under different contracts. Buyers can select the contract they shop under at either the start of the shopping flow or when they add an item to their order, depending on the store design. When purchasing items under different contracts the following rules apply:
- Contracts for all items in an order must share at least one payment method. If the contract for an item does not share a payment method, the buyer can not add that item to the order. Only the payment methods shared by all items in an order can be used to pay for the order.
- All items in an order must come from contracts belonging to the same business account or the store default contract.
When creating contracts for WebSphere Commerce, it is important to understand the business model in which you store is based, as well as the participants, usages, and XML elements for each business model, as outlined in the following table:
Business model |
Contract XML element |
Usage |
Participants |
---|---|---|---|
B2B direct |
BuyerContract |
Organization buyer (Default) |
|
Demand chain |
ReferralContract |
Referral |
|
|
HostingContract |
Reseller |
|
Supply chain |
HostingContract |
Supplier |
|