Understand accounts, contacts, and contracts

Account-based commerce uses a combination of accounts, contacts, and contracts to manage access to a storefront by companies that do business with you.

This section applies to Open Storefront Framework (OSF) and Storefront Classic.

In order to provide an organization with access to an account-based storefront, the organization needs an account on that storefront with pertinent details such as the organization name, logo, billing and shipping addresses, tax reference number, and so on.

An account can contain sub accounts that represent multiple hierarchies of organizational structure. For example, a principal account represents a company. That account can contain a number of sub accounts that represent divisions or business units, and each division sub account can contain a sub account for each department in the division. Sub accounts can automatically inherit account properties, billing and shipping addresses, and contract details from parent accounts. See Work with accounts for more information about creating accounts. See Configure page layouts for account hierarchies for information about how to configure layouts and widgets to support hierarchies.

Each account is associated with a list of contacts. A contact is an individual within an organization who is allowed to purchase from the account-based storefront. You create contacts in the Commerce administration interface, but you can also assign delegated administration privileges to contacts so they can create and manage other contacts. See Understand delegated administration and Work with account contacts for more information.

Work with Multiple Stores from One Commerce Instance

When working with multiple sites, accounts must be associated with a contract, which assigns a catalog and a group of price lists for a given site. A contract between the storefront and the organization defines what products the organization can purchase on the site and how much it will pay for them. Note that before a contact can access a site, the contact’s account must have an associated contract.

You can configure the following business account-specific information on a per site bases:

• contracts
• approval settings
• payment method types
• shipping methods

For additional information on working with multiple sites, refer to the Run Multiple Stores from One Commerce Instance.

If a primary account includes sub accounts, each sub account automatically inherits its parent’s contracts by default. See Work with account contracts for more information.