Partners and Plans

Use Partners and Plans to allow your partners' shoppers to purchase specific products with or without a discount. Your partners' shoppers can access the plan from a special landing page that you must provide via a link or URL.

After you create a partner plan, you will email or post a link to the partner plan on your existing store. When a partner clicks the link, the system directs them to a page where they can request access to the partner plan or sign in if they have access.

How to implement a partner plan

Creating a partner plan and implementing it on your store is a multi-step process. The following task provides an overview of how to create a partner plan and then make it available on your store.

Required Role: Partner Plan ManagerClosed This Global Commerce user role allows users to access the partner plans and related features.

  1. Enable the purchase plans feature for your store. See Configuring site settings for more information about how to enable Private Stores (and therefore partner plans) for your store.

    Note: The partner plans feature uses some of the same code and technology as the Private Store feature, which is why you must enable Private Stores before you can fully use partner plans. If you do not enable Private Stores, partners will get an error message when they attempt to access the landing page for your partner plan.

  2. Create and then deploy the partner plans you want to make available to partners through your store. There are several things you define when you create the partner plan that determines how it works:

    • Whether the partner plan is public or private. See Public versus private partner plans for more information.
    • Whether you want to require partners to read and approve terms and conditions for the partner plan before they can access the partner plan and place an order. See Terms and conditions for more information.
    • When you want the partner plan to be active on your store. You can set specific dates for when the partner plan should begin or end, or set no dates at all. See Effective dates for more information.
    • What pricing and discounts you want to provide with the partner plan. When you define pricing and discounts, you can choose a simple discount or use points-based pricing. See Pricing for more information.
    • What sales levels you want the partner plan to use. The sales levels define discounts based on the volume of purchases. See Sales levels for more information.
    • What products in your catalog you want to offer your partners. You add the products to product groups so that you can control the discount and pricing for products in groups. See Products and product groups for more information.

  3. Provide your partners with access to the partner plan. You can do this by posting a link to the partner plan landing page on your store or sending the link via email.

    • When a partner clicks the link (either on your store or in email), the link directs them to a page where they can request access or sign in to a partner plan.
    • When partners sign up, they have to provide certain information such as name, company, address, and email address.
    • Both you and your partners are sent an email when they sign up for a partner plan.

    • Depending on how you have set up the partner plan, the system will automatically approve the partners for the partner plan immediately, or you will manually approve them to have access to the partner plan. See step 4 for more information.

    • You can only associate a partner with one partner plan at a time. Partner plans use the email address the partner provided hen they registered to determine if they have access to another partner plan created for the store.

  4. Approve any partners for those partner plans that require manual approval of partners. You will not have to do this if you set up your partner plans to automatically approve partners. Your partners will receive an email when they are approved or declined for a partner plan.

  5. Once you complete the previous steps, sales will begin for the partner plan. From this point onward, you will need to:

    • Continue to manually approve partners and provide partners with access to the partner plan.
    • Manage your partners as necessary by activating or deactivating partners, changing the associated partner plan, and so on.

    See Managing partner plans for more information.

Public versus private partner plans

Partner plans are either public or private. The only difference between a public and private plan is what your partners see when they click the link to access the partner plan landing page.

  • Public Partner Plans—The landing page for the store shows a list of all public partner plans from which the partner can choose. The partner must select a partner plan and then register for access to that partner plan. Once approved, the partner can sign in to the partner plan they have been given access to and place an order. Anyone with access to the partner plan landing page will see (and can register for) any of the public partner plans you have created for your store. However, partners can only register for one partner plan at a time.

  • Private Partner Plans—The landing page allows the partner to register for access to the specific partner plan for which you have provided them access (through the URL). For partners associated with a private partner plan, it would seem that you only have the one partner plan.

Terms and conditions

When you create a partner plan, you may want to require that shoppers review and accept the terms and conditions for your partner plan before they can make a purchase. Having your shoppers review and accept terms and conditions is not required, but you can choose to make them so if needed.

Effective dates

When you create a partner plan, you must indicate how long you want the partner plan to be active and accessible to your partner shoppers.

You can choose to have a partner plan to become active immediately after you deploy it or on a given date. You can also choose to have a partner plan end on a specific date or set no specific end date.

When a partner tries to access a plan outside of the dates you have specified, the partner will get a message informing them that the partner plan is no longer active and cannot be accessed.

Pricing

When you create a partner plan, you choose:

  • The price list you want the partner plan to use. The price list you choose for the partner plan must already exist on your store.
  • Whether you want to use points-based pricing for purchases within the partner plan.

The system uses the price list you associate with a partner plan as a baseline for establishing pricing. The system applies any discounts you set up for the partner plan to the pricing in the base price list.

Sales levels

Sales levels allow you to provide different levels of discounts and products for your partner plan. Most partner plans use sales levels to provide partners an incentive to purchase more and move up a level.

The number of units a partner has purchased or the total sales amount of their purchases defines the sales levels. Each time a partner makes a purchase, their sales level may change based on the value of their order or whether they purchased enough units to change levels.

The discount or pricing you have defined for a sales level is used for purchases when there is no discount or special pricing defined for the product group of the product being purchased. Product group discounts or pricing are always used. Sales level discounts or pricing are used when there is no product group discount or special pricing.

The sales level a partner is assigned to is determined every month using their sales data from the previous full month. If the partner was deactivated and had no sales during the previous month, they will be assigned to the first (lowest) sales level.

For example, if your partner made three purchases totaling $300 during August and the sales levels in the partner plan have three levels with the highest level beginning at $250 in sales, the partner will automatically be in the highest sales level in September. This means the partner would only have access to purchase the product associated with that sales level, at the pricing defined for that level.

Products and product groups

The products you make available in a partner plan must already exist in your store's catalog. When you create a partner plan, you create groups and then add products from your catalogs to those groups.

Grouping your products allows you to offer discounts by your defined groups. You can use product groups with sales levels to create various levels of discounts and purchase options. If you define a discount for your product groups, the system will always apply that discount purchases of products in the product group instead of any sales level discount you might have defined for the partner plan.

Points-based pricing

Points-based pricing is a way to provide your partner with shopper incentives for repeat purchases. With points-based pricing, your partners can receive greater discounts the more they purchase.

Partner plan notifications

The signup and purchase process triggers several notifications that the system sends to you and your partners.

Notifications sent to partners

The following list shows the events which trigger the system to send an email to a partner. The text of the specific email may differ, depending on the customizations done for your store. Keep in mind that your partner may receive other emails, such as those regarding their account (user name and password).

  • Partner signs up for access to a partner plan.
  • You approve or decline the partner for a partner plan.

  • You activate or deactivate a partner for a partner plan.

  • You can only deactivate partners after you approve them for a partner plan. Similarly, you can only activate a partner if you previously deactivated them or declined their access to a partner plan

Notifications sent to you

You will get a notification when a partner signs up for access to a partner plan.