Shopping Cart Options for Business Customers

Your business customers can place orders on your Commerce website in different ways. For example, in large corporations several customer contacts may place orders for their separate departments in separate shopping carts and in small businesses one person may be in charge of ordering. Ordering could also be a collaborative process where two or three contacts work together to place orders in the same shopping cart. See the Record Management topic Contacts for more information about contacts.

Depending on what is most appropriate for your business customers, administrators can choose from one of two shopping cart sharing modes:

Separate carts for each customer contact – Each customer contact for a business has their own shopping cart. A contact’s cart is not visible to the other contacts. This prevents the following situations:
- A contact removes items that another contact has added.
- A contact checks out an order before other contacts have added all the items they need.
Note:
Though shopping carts are separate, customer contacts can see orders placed by all contacts in the My Account section of your web store. If you want the My Account section to contain only orders placed by the logged in contact, you must use SuiteCommerce or SuiteCommerce Advanced 2019.1 and above.
Single cart shared by all customer contacts – Business customers use a single shopping cart which is shared by all contacts for that customer.

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

Shopping Cart Behavior and Limitations

Before setting the shopping cart options for business customers, be aware that:

To maintain good website performance, there is a soft limit of 100 unique items that can be added to the shopping cart for SuiteCommerce and SuiteCommerce Advanced websites.
There is no hard limit on how many items a customer contact can add to the shopping cart. However, the more items in the cart, the longer it will take to continue to add items.
If contacts add more than 100 items to the shopping cart, there is no guarantee that the order will be able to be successfully completed.

Shopping Cart Sharing Mode

On the Web Site Setup record, choose the shopping cart sharing mode for your website. A different sharing mode can be defined for each website.

To set the shopping cart sharing mode:

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

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 are not accessible unless you revert to individual carts.

Identify Order Creator

Business customers can identify which of their contacts placed a sales order by:

Checking the Sales Order form.

Go to Transactions > Sales > Enter Sales Orders > List and click View next to the sales order you want to check. Go to the Relationships tab. The responsible contact is listed with the role Order Creator.
Checking the order email that is sent by default only 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 tab and check the CC Customer on All Emails Related to Orders Placed by Contacts box.
Click Save.