A reseller portal: prices and margins per role

As soon as you sell through resellers and agents, more people look at the same catalogue and the same orders. Not everyone should see the same figures. A customer should not know another customer's price, a reseller should not see your purchase price, and nobody outside your own team should know your margin.

Four roles

• Customer: orders for themselves at their own prices and follows their own orders and documents.
• Agent: sells to a group of customers and sees the customers they serve.
• Reseller: sells your range on, in a white-label portal under their own name and styling, on your catalogue.
• Administrator: your own team. Administrators see the purchase and sales price and the margin per order line, and manage accounts, prices and roles.

Who sees and does what

Read the table as one possible set-up. The actual permissions follow from your own agreements with customers, agents and resellers.

Customer prices from one source

Prices differ per customer, per country and sometimes per volume. If they live in several places, such as your ERP, a spreadsheet and the portal, they drift apart. Keep one source and let the portal show from it what fits the role and the customer. Then a customer always sees the current price, in their own currency, and your team no longer has to send round separate price lists.

Margin: for your own team only

The margin is the difference between sales price and purchase price per order line. It shows which orders pay and which do not, and your team uses it to decide on discounts. A customer or reseller who sees it knows your purchase price and can negotiate on it. That is why only administrators see the margin. BDI Nexus records purchase and sales price per order line; only your own team sees the margin, and the customer sees their own price.

Where margins can leak unnoticed

• An export to a spreadsheet or CSV with more columns than the screen shows.
• A PDF or order confirmation that carries the purchase price or margin.
• A notification or email with the full order line.
• An agent or reseller with permissions that are too wide, for example because an old role was left in place.
• A list or search function that sends fields the screen hides.

The same applies to each of these: what the server does not send, nobody can read out. Hiding a field in the screen is therefore not enough. Have the server pass the margin only to a role that is allowed to see it.

White label: different brand, same rules

In a white-label portal your catalogue runs under the reseller's name and styling. The rules for roles and prices still apply: the reseller's customers see the prices meant for them, the reseller sees their own prices and your margin stays with the administrators. Whether a reseller can also set their own sales price or mark-up in such a portal is an agreement you settle beforehand.

Before you set up roles

Describe per role what it needs to do its job and give no more. Start with the four roles above and add another only when the difference really exists. Test each role with a test account before you go live, and look not only at the screen but also at downloads, documents and emails that come out of the portal.