Managing which Customer Segments can Access Item Segments
When you have defined the item segments and customer segments you want to use, you need to define which item segments can be seen and purchased by which customer segments. This involves two settings:
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Mapping – defines a relationship between an item segment and one or more customer segments
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Website Visibility Level – defines the nature of the relationship between the item segment and the mapped customer segments. The options are:
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Display Fully – enables customers in the mapped customer segments to view and purchase all items in the item segment
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Disable Purchase – hides the Add to Cart button in the web store for all items in the item segment. This prevents customers in the mapped customer segments from buying the items
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Disable Purchase and Hide Price – hides the item price and the Add to Cart button for all items in the item segment. This prevents customers in the mapped customer segments from viewing the item price and buying the items.
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Hide Fully – hides unmapped items from all users. Unmapped items are items that are not mapped to any customer segments. For more information about unmapped items, see Defining Visibility of Unmapped Items.
This visibility level is available only for the Unmapped Items item segment.
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If you have a SuiteCommerce Advanced website, the following visibility options can be used only after you have upgraded to the 2020.2 release of SuiteCommerce Advanced or later:
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Disable Purchase
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Disable Purchase and Hide Price
Do not use these options if your site is using a SuiteCommerce Advanced release prior to 2020.2.
For some item segments, you may not want to restrict them to specific customer segments. In that case, you can make it possible for all users to view and purchase them.
Finally, there may be items on your web store that are not mapped to a customer segment. These are grouped into an item segment called Unmapped Items. Specify which customer segments, if any, need to see and purchase the items in Unmapped Items segment.
You can define which customers can see and buy which item segments from the following areas of NetSuite:
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Customer Segments Manager (CSM) – You can define mappings and visibility level between item segments and customer segments in the CSM. It provides an overview of all the mappings that have been defined and is the only place you can define whether unmapped items can be seen and bought by all users. For more information, see Defining which Customer Segments can Access Items (CSM) and Defining Visibility of Unmapped Items.
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Customer Group record – You can define which item segments a customer group can view, view prices, or purchase on the customer group record. For more information, see Defining which Customer Segments can Access Items (Customer Group).
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Item Collection record – You can define which customer segments can view, view prices, or purchase items in an item collection on the item collections record. For more information, see Defining which Customer Segments can Access Items (Item Collection).
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Commerce Categories record – You can define which customer segments can view items in a commerce category on the Commerce Category record. However, you cannot set the Disable Purchase or the Disable Purchase and Hide Price website visibility options. For more information, see Defining which Customer Segments can View Items (Commerce Categories).
Please be aware of the following:
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All item collection to customer segment mappings are visible and editable in the Customer Segments Manager regardless of where the mapping was created.
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If a customer is in more than one customer segment, and these segments have different website visibility levels for the same item segment, the customer will have the highest website visibility level of the customer segments they belong to. For an example of this, see the Head Office Buyers group in the example Different Product Lines Available to Different Customers.
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Similarly, if an item is in more than one item segment, and a customer has access to more than one of these segments but with different website visibility levels, the highest visibility level will apply to the relationship between the customer and the item. For example, if tomatoes are in both the Fruits item segment and the Vegetables item segment, and a customer has the website visibility level of Display Fully for Fruits and Disable Purchase for Vegetables, the customer can buy tomatoes.
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If a customer in a customer group has contacts linked to it, the contacts are able to see the associated item segments only if the Give Access checkbox is checked for the customer and the Access checkbox is checked for the contact on the Customer record.
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If you make a dynamic item collection visible to a customer segment, PCV uses a snapshot of the dynamic item collection members. The snapshot is updated every hour. Similarly, if you use a dynamic customer group as a customer segment, PCV uses a snapshot of the customers in the customer group and updates the snapshot every hour.