Elastic Path Account Management
note
Account Management API is now deprecated and we recommend that you use Account Management functionality built into Elastic Path Commerce 8.2 and later.
Overview
Elastic Path B2B Commerce provides the Account Management service that works with Elastic Path Commerce to define buyer organization’s account structure and to assign associates to the accounts. The Account Management service provides capabilities to create a top level account for the buyer organization and creates multiple sub-accounts depending on stores, regions, departments or divisions within the top level account.
The seller administrators use the Account Management user interface to work with accounts and various user roles.
Features
The features of the Account Management service are:
- Organizational accounts: Model organizational accounts and sub-accounts for the buying organization.
- Shop on behalf of an organization: Enable users in an organization to shop on behalf of the organization.
- Provide exclusive pricing: Enable seller organization to provide account specific pricing for each account within a buyer organization.
Accounts
Seller administrator can create and manage commerce accounts for buying organizations or for group buyers. An account might contain sub-accounts that represent various hierarchies of organizational structure. The seller organization models the account structure for the corporate accounts so that they can manage accounting and commerce processes. With this functionality, the buyer organizations can manage the organizational accounts to conduct the business successfully and integrate with the rest of the e-commerce system. Each account or sub-account has users with specific roles associated with the account to manage account activities. For more information see the Roles and Permissions section.
Roles and Permissions
Seller Administrator
Only a seller administrator can create the parent account for a buyer organizations. You can set up the account hierarchy for the seller organization only after creating the top level account for the organization. The role of a seller administrator is called seller admin and a seller administrator can:
- Create a new seller administrator account
- Create a new associate account
- Assign associates to an account with an appropriate role
- Log in to the Account Manager user interface
- Remove associates, such as, buyer or catalog browser
- Change the name or any other attributes of an account
Associates
Each account in Account Management services is associated with a list of users in the buyer organizations and each user is called an associate. An associate can have the following roles depending on the level of permission:
- Buyer: Completes purchase and transactions on behalf of the account
- Catalog browser: Only views the catalog. An associate with this role cannot add products to cart or complete the purchase. An associate can be a part of multiple accounts with the same role or different roles, however the permission is not inherited to the sub-accounts within an account
Shop on behalf of an organization or account
The seller administrator can add associates to the buyer organizations and enable them to purchase on behalf of the accounts within the organization.