Types of Webstore

Sana Commerce Cloud is available for any type of a webstore, both B2B (business-to-business) sales portals for business customers and sales agents, and B2C (business-to-consumer) online retail shops for consumers. Sana Commerce Cloud also supports a mixed B2X scenario which implies the combination of both customer types, B2B and B2C. This hybrid scenario serves all customer roles simultaneously.

Sana Commerce Cloud supports three webstore types: private, public and closed. You can select the webstore type which is the most suitable for your business strategy: B2B, B2C or B2X.

In Sana Admin click: Setup > Basics > Store information. On the Store information page, you can select the type of your store.

The following types are available:

  • Closed store: This type of webstore is closed and thus is not publicly accessible. This is a typical B2B scenario. When a customer visits the webstore, only Login and Forgot password pages are available. Customers can see the webstore catalog after they log in. In the closed store, the existing customers from your ERP system are connected to the shop accounts in Sana Admin. Sales agents can place orders on behalf of their customers as well as create prospect customers.

For more information about how to create accounts for the customers, contacts and sales agents, see Shop Accounts.

  • Private store: This type of webstore is partially closed. It can be used in a B2B scenario and for the mixed B2X webstores when you serve both customer types, B2B and B2C. This means that only navigation, content pages, FAQ, News and Contact us pages are available to the customers when they visit the webstore. Customers can see the webstore catalog only after they log in.

If you have product sets on some content pages, customers can see all content of the page in the webstore, except for products. Customers can see products on the content pages once they log in to the webstore.

  • Public store: This type of webstore is open and thus is publicly accessible. This is a typical B2C scenario. This means that anonymous webstore visitors can see the webstore catalog and all content. In the public store any webstore visitor can register online as a customer or create an order as a guest without registration, if it is enabled in Sana.