Commerce & Purchasing Controls
Giving Buyers Freedom Without Giving Up Purchasing Control
A company store is supposed to make ordering easier.
That becomes difficult when the buyer has to remember the purchasing policy before they can place an order.
This employee can order from one catalog but not another. A department has company funds available. Orders above a certain amount need approval. One group can use a credit card. Another cannot.
Those rules may be necessary.
The buyer should not have to administer them.
A well-designed customer program can put the relevant boundaries into the ordering process itself, allowing routine purchases to move while sending the exceptions to the people who need to review them.
Not every order needs the same level of control
Approvals are useful when there is something worth approving.
Applying the same review process to every order can create work without giving the customer much additional control.
A program may care about an order because of its value, the amount a user has spent over a period of time, the shipping method, payment method or quantity being purchased.
Commerce can use conditions like these to determine when an order requires approval. The buyer can also be warned before placing an order when the configured rules will send it for review.
That gives the customer a way to put attention where it is needed without treating an ordinary purchase the same way as an exception.
The store can know which rules apply to whom
Customer programs rarely have one kind of buyer.
An employee ordering approved merchandise may have different permissions from a regional manager. A franchise location may have its own assortment. Another group may have access to different payment or shipping options.
Those differences are easier to manage when they are associated with the user or group inside the ordering environment.
The buyer does not need to consult a document to remember which catalog applies or which options they are allowed to use.
The store already has that context.
For a broader explanation of how customer-specific stores work, see What Is a Company Store?
Company funds can be part of the ordering experience
Some programs give employees, departments or locations money to use for approved purchases.
Commerce spending accounts can be assigned according to program rules and restricted to eligible items or catalogs. During checkout, the available spending account can be applied to the products that qualify.
This is different from simply telling someone they have a budget and expecting them to keep track of it separately.
The amount available through the program becomes visible where the purchase is happening.
Real purchases can also cross those boundaries.
A buyer may have company funds available without having enough to cover the full order. Responsive checkout can support split payment using combinations of spending accounts, billing locations and credit cards when those options are available to the user's group.
The useful part is not having more payment methods on the screen. It is being able to handle the way the customer's program actually funds the purchase.
Buyers need to know when a rule affects their order
A purchasing rule can be perfectly correct and still create a poor experience if the buyer cannot tell what is happening.
An order goes into approval, but the shopper thinks it disappeared.
A spending limit has been reached, but the reason checkout cannot continue is unclear.
A payment option is unavailable because of the user's permissions, but that context exists only in the administrator's configuration.
Good controls need understandable feedback.
Commerce can warn shoppers before order placement when configured approval rules are triggered and provide feedback when spending-account limits affect an order.
The buyer may not need to understand how the rule was configured.
They do need enough information to understand what happened to their order.
The person approving the order has work to do too
Approval does not end when the buyer submits the request.
Someone has to review it.
That person needs a reliable path back to the order and enough context to decide what happens next.
Commerce supports customizable approval-reminder behavior relevant to SSO and Punchout environments, as well as approval handling around payment and billing configurations.
These are administrative details, but they affect whether an approval process actually works once people begin using it.
If the approver cannot get to the request or understand what they are reviewing, the rule has created a queue rather than a useful control.
Decide where the boundaries really belong
The goal of a customer program is not to create the maximum possible number of rules.
It is to decide where a boundary is useful.
Perhaps routine orders can move without review while larger purchases need approval.
Perhaps employees can order freely from an approved catalog using assigned company funds.
Perhaps certain groups have different products or payment options because their responsibilities are different.
Those are business decisions first.
The store's job is to apply them consistently without asking every buyer to become an expert in the rules behind the program.
For a broader look at the ecommerce environment around these controls, see B2B Ecommerce for Print & Promo Distributors.
Commerce supports customer-specific ordering with user and group permissions, configurable approval rules, spending accounts and checkout controls.