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Some of your selling partners may not have the infrastructure to maintain their own e-commerce Web site. However, these partners can still participate in e-commerce through a deployment enabled for C3 Partner.com. You, as the enterprise, or one of Comergent's application service provider (ASP) partners may host C3 Partner.com for your partners.
In Release 6.0 and higher, partners are enabled for C3 Partner.com either as a Partner.com Partner or as a Storefront Partner.
Storefront administrators can manage the emails that are sent to their customers when they place orders so that the email messages are customized for their storefront. See Managing Email Templates.
You enable a partner as either a Partner.com Partner or as Storefront Partner using the Commerce tab in their partner profile. See To Enable a Profile for C3 Partner.com.
A customer is a partner created by an administrator for a partner enabled for C3 Partner.com. Once a partner is enabled for C3 Partner.com, an enterprise administrator or a partner administrator can create partners called customers using the procedure described in To Create Customers (enterprise administrator) or To Create Customers (partner administrator).
As described earlier ( Managing the Sales Channel), the enterprise administrator creates partners in the sales channel. They create a partner administrator for each partner who, in turn, creates partner users. These users log in to the enterprise site using the usernames and passwords assigned to them by the partner administrator.
Storefronts receiving price-and-availability requests and list transfers might be partners enabled for C3 Partner.com. These partners might want to give some of the users access to additional products and special pricing. To do this, they create a customer profile for each of these partners. This profile is distinct from the profile created by the enterprise administrator. This profile represents the partner as viewed by the C3 Partner.com-enabled partner.
For each customer, the partner administrator for a Partner.com Partner creates the users who will get access to products or special pricing. These users represent some or all of the users described earlier, who already have a user profile created for them by their own partner administrator. In this case, however, they are given unique usernames and passwords that gives them access to the special products or pricing.
The process is similar for a Storefront Partner. However, for each customer, the Storefront Partner creates a user assigned the Profile Administrator function. This storefront administrator, in turn, creates the other users with the unique usernames and passwords.
When these users log into the enterprise site, they use the username and password assigned to them in their user profile as enterprise partners. They select products and fill a cart. When they perform price-and-availability checks, they can either use the enterprise username and password, or they can use the username and password assigned to them as users belonging to the customer. They would use the latter to get the special pricing.
In addition, these end-users can log directly into the Web site maintained for the Storefront Partner and get access to additional products, as well as order products directly from the storefront. Anonymous users, not affiliated with any customer, can also browse this storefront, browse the product catalog, and access product information. Then, when these anonymous users are ready to order products, they can register themselves and, as registered users, order products.
Storefront partners must keep their product and pricing information current in the Comergent eBusiness System. Partner administrators create products through C3 Product Manager. When they create a product, they assign a product ID that will be a reference in the enterprise product catalog. Through C3 Pricing, they create and maintain price lists for these enterprise product IDs. The partner administrator identifies partners of the enterprise to whom the partner administrator wants to assign the price lists (that is, to whom the partner administrator wants to make the products on those price lists available). Since only the enterprise administrator can assign price lists to enterprise partners, the partner administrator notifies the enterprise administrator to assign the lists to these partners.
Once the partner administrator has done this, Comergent recommends that partners identify the availability of the product for their own product IDs ( Product Availability File). Partners can also provide a file that maps the enterprise product IDs to their own product IDs ( Product Mapping File).
Once they have created the products and price lists, and ensured that their price lists have been assigned, Comergent recommends that C3 Partner.com-enabled partners provide product availability information for their own product IDs.
Partners provide availability by creating a file with the availability information then uploading it. As described in Product Availability File Format, the file includes such information as warehouse location, availability, and restock quantity. Partners can create an availability file using their preferred text editor. Alternatively, if they create the data using a spreadsheet other than Microsoft Excel, then they can simply export the data as a tab-delimited file. Follow the instructions provided by the spreadsheet application for further details.
Once the file is uploaded, partners can modify the availability information in one of two ways:
See Managing the C3 Partner.com Environment for the procedures for uploading, downloading, or updating.
Partners can create a product mapping between the enterprise product ID and their own product ID. Product mappings may be uploaded to the Comergent eBusiness System in a product mapping file. The format of the file is a tab-delimited file as described in Product Mapping File Format. They can use their preferred text editor to create or modify the file. Alternatively, if they create the data using a spreadsheet other than Microsoft Excel, then they can simply export the data as a tab-delimited file. Follow the instructions provided by the spreadsheet application for further details.
Once the file is uploaded, partners can modify the mapping information in one of two ways:
The partner administrator of a C3 Partner.com-enabled partner use business rules to define the following:
As described earlier, the partner's name is used as part of the URL into which the end-user can log. This business rule defines a default.
Administrators of each partner enabled for C3 Partner.com perform administration tasks to manage their sites. These tasks include the basic administration tasks that enterprise administrators perform to manage their partners and users. See
They can also view their order (commerce) activity, manage their price lists, products. See:
In addition, these partner administrators must manage some tasks that are specific to the C3 Partner.com environment. See Managing the C3 Partner.com Environment.
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