Merchants and Merchant Relations Feature Overview

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In the context of Spryker B2B eCommerce platform, there can be three key figures: marketplace owner, merchant and buyer.

  • The marketplace owner owns the platform and acts as a broker between merchants and buyers.
  • The merchants are actually sellers usually represented by a company.
  • The buyers are often business units of companies that purchase products or services from the merchants.

The business relationships between merchants and buyers are usually based on contracts.

The diagram below shows relations within the merchant domain:

Merchants Management

Merchants can be created, edited and manged on the Merchants page in the Administration Interface. The merchants can also be added in bulk by importing them from a .csv file.

The .csv file for import must contain populated merchant_key and merchant_name fields.

To import merchants from the data/import/merchant.csv file, run

console data:import merchant

Or, if you want to import merchants from your file, indicate the path to it:

console data:import merchant -f path_to_file.csv

Merchant Relations Management

The merchant relations are managed on Merchant Relations page of the Administration Interface. Here, the shop administrators can view, create, edit and delete merchant relations. The Merchant Relations table contains information about merchant name, business unit owner and assigned business units.

The process of the merchant relation creation begins with choosing a merchant to which the merchant relation will be added. Then, a company which business unit will own the relation, is selected. After that, the business units are assigned to the merchant relation.

There can be only one business unit owner, however multiple business units can be assigned to the relation.

For example, Towels company sells towels to Rest Hotel, specifically, say Rest Hotel Berlin and Rest Hotel New York. In this case, the Towels company is merchant, Rest Hotel is the business unit owner, and Rest Hotel Berlin and Rest Hotel New York are the assigned business units.

It is possible to have two identical relations of the same merchant and business unit owner.

Like with merchants, the merchant relations can also be added in bulk by importing them from a .csv file with populated merchant_relation_key, mechant_key, company_business_unit_owner_key and company_business_unit_asignee_keys fields. To import merchant relations from the data/import/merchant-relations.csv file, run

console data:import merchant-relationship

or, if you want to import merchant relations from your file, indicate the path to it:

console data:import merchant-relationship -f path_to_file.csv

See Also:

 

 

Last review date: Feb 8, 2019