Customer Groups

VPCARThas a feature to allow customers to be grouped. You can create your own customer groups and then these groups can be assigned to customers.

For example,if you create two customer groups “Wholesale” and “Retail”.

Then you assign customer A to the Wholesale group and customer B to the Retailgroup.
With these customer groups, you can have the flexibility to control the customers by giving a special discount to certain groups, certain right to view products,contents, etc.

To view/edit customer groups, you can go to administration page : Customers > Customer Groups

To Add a new customer group, click Add a Record. You can see the form as shown below:

Group Name	Name of the Group
Description	Description of the Group
Type	Type of the Group, Static or Dynamic. - Static : means you need to assign member to the customer group - Dynamic : means you do not need to assign member, but sql query to customer group. With Dynamic type of customer group, you need to enter the SQL Query to have the customers that match.The Query specified will be grouped into it.
Discount	Set discount for customer price groups, e.g. 0.1 or 200. If the field value is smaller than 1, then it will be a percentage. If the field value greater than 1, it will be a fixed amount.
Product Price Field	This field is designed to replace and have the same functionality with xcustomerpricefields in our previous 650version. Product price field is used only when customer-based pricing is used. It lists the field in the products table to be used for a particular customer group. For example : cprice,retailprice, or pother3 etc.. Merchant can set Discount group and Product Price Field together at the same time. Below is the example of the use of Discount and Product Price Field : Customer group A has the following setup : Discount is 0.1 Product Price Field is pother3(means to use pother3 field in the Products table to store the product price for customer group A). Then the following product A and B setup,for example: Product A Price: 300 Other3: empty value Product B Price: 200 Other3: 100 Assume a customer is assigned into customer group A.When the customer logs in, that customer will see what is shown below: Product A will display the price: $270. Below is the calculation of the price for Product A: (300 - (300 * 0.1)) = $270 Product B will display the price:$90. Below is the calculation of the price for Product B: (100 - (100 * 0.1)) = $90 If you do not want to use the Product Price Field, just leave this field value empty.
Priority	Used only when customer-based pricing is used. Priority is used for discounting purposes and very useful if a customeris entered into many groups. VPCART applies an automatic priority for group Type. A customer group that is static will be first priority followed by thecustomer group that is dynamic. After that, manual priority comes next. The value for manual priority should be numerical; e.g. 1 or 2 or 3 etc. With 1 as the top priority rather than other bigger numbers. For example, we have customer A grouped into two customer groups, e.g. Group Wholesaler and Group Reseller,and both groups were assigned a discount value each. For example, Wholesaler Group will get a 0.1 discount and Group Reseller will get a 0.3 discount. If a merchant sets the Priority value for the Group Reseller to 1 and Priority value for the Group Wholesaler to 2, then when customer A logs into the site, VPCART will apply a 0.3 discount for customer A, because the priority for Reseller is higher.

The following configuration is related to the customer groups if you are using Customer Groups with Dynamic type:

XCustomerGroupDynamicAutoAssign

If set to Yes, VPCart will auto assign members to the Dynamic Group, which is specific in Groups table, but it will degrade the performance of VPCart. If set to No, you need to manually periodically update / refresh Dynamic Group, which is specific in Groups table.
Default is set to No.

After you have created Customer Groups, you can assign customers to the groups you wish.