Shopping Cart Options for Business Customers

Your business customers can place orders on your Commerce site in a few different ways. For example, in big companies, several contacts might place orders for their own departments using separate carts. In small businesses, one person might handle all the ordering. Sometimes, two or three contacts work together and place orders in the same cart. For more information about contacts, see the Record Management topic Contacts.

Depending on what works best for your business customers, administrators can pick one of two shopping cart sharing modes:

Separate carts for each customer contact – Each contact has their own cart, and it's not visible to others. This helps prevent:
- One contact removing items another contact added.
- One contact checking out before others have added everything they need.
Note:
Even though carts are separate, contacts can see all orders placed by anyone in the My Account section of your web store. If you want My Account to show only orders placed by the logged-in contact, you need SuiteCommerce or SuiteCommerce Advanced 2019.1 or later.
Single cart shared by all customer contacts – All contacts for a business use the same shopping cart.

For both options, only one set of payment details is defined for the business customer.

Shopping Cart Behavior and Limitations

Before you set shopping cart options for business customers, keep in mind:

To keep your site running smoothly, there's a soft limit of 100 unique items that can be added to the shopping cart for SuiteCommerce and SuiteCommerce Advanced sites.
There's no hard limit on how many items a contact can add, but the more items in the cart, the longer it will take to continue to add items.
If contacts add more than 100 items, there's no guarantee the order will go through.

Shopping Cart Sharing Mode

On the Web Site Setup record, choose the shopping cart sharing mode for your site. You can set a different mode for each site.

To set the shopping cart sharing mode:

Go to Commerce > Websites > Web Site List.
Click Edit next to the website you want to update.
Go to the Shopping subtab.
In the Shopping Basics section, one of these options from the Shopping Cart Sharing Mode list:
- Single cart shared by all customer contacts (default)
- Individual carts for each customer contact
Click Save to finish.

If you switch from a single shared cart to individual carts for contacts, the existing shopping cart is retained and can still be accessed by anyone logging in using the main customer login details. Individual contacts receive new, empty carts when they log in.

If you switch from individual carts to a shared cart, contacts lose access to their individual carts. The individual carts are retained until they expire in about 30 days, but aren't accessible unless you revert to individual carts.

Identify Order Creator

Business customers can see which contact placed a sales order by:

Checking the Sales Order form.

Go to Transactions > Sales > Enter Sales Orders > List, and click View next to the order you want to check. On the Relationships subtab, you'll see the contact listed as the Order Creator.
Checking the order email, which by default only goes to the contact who placed the order.

If the CC Customer on All Emails Related to Orders Placed by Contacts email preference is checked, business customers receive email for all orders placed by their contacts.

To send copies of order email to the business customer:

Go to Setup > Company > Email Preferences.
Go to the Transactions subtab and check the CC Customer on All Emails Related to Orders Placed by Contacts box.
Click Save to finish.