KommerceServer Agencies Overview
There are numerous scenarios encountered in the Ecommerce supply chain. Often times, customers that buy from you may also be resellers of your products (e.g. retail outlets, dealers) or they may provide services centered around the products you sell (e.g. contractors, repair facilities). You may even store inventory on consignment with certain customers and you would like to use your online store to help sell that inventory. Regardless of the relationship, KommerceServer allows you to define your own agencies for key customers. Agencies defined in KommerceServer need to support one or more of three basic traits:
- They sell your products (i.e. Sales agencies)
- They provide repair, installation, or other value added service (i.e. Service agencies)
- They store your inventory for sale (i.e. Inventory agencies)
KommerceServer allows you to drive traffic to sales and service agencies through an interactive directory service lookup by zip code. This lead generation feature can foster customer loyalty and thus higher sales for your company. User-defined types can define minimum annual sales thresholds in which to participate in your lead generation program.
Sales Agencies
The sales agency is used to define a business that sells your products such as dealers, retail outlets, etc. If you will be selling products on your website directly, you will most likely want to set up a sales agency for your own company. If you leverage outside sales agencies, lead generation can be implemented through the Agency Dealer locator page.
Sales agencies can also identify the individual sales representatives along with their phone number, email address, picture, and internal sales rep identifier that is used by the back office. This enables you to expose the sales rep information on the Customer Home Page for your customers that have an assigned sales rep. An example of the sales rep module is shown below.
For information on setting up sales reps in KommerceServer, refer to the Setting up Sales Representatives topic.
Service Agencies
A service agency is used to define a contractor, a repair facility, or other type of service provider that does business with you. To provide lead generation for service agencies, use the Service Provider locator page page.
Inventory Agencies
Typically, an inventory agency is used to define an internal branch or store location but it could be used for outside agencies as well, such as consignment inventory. To implement the ability for your customers to find your store branch locations, use the Branch Locator page.
Integrated Product Availability
Inventory agencies can also be used in conjunction with the online store catalog, allowing users to view inventory availability for individual products across the store branch locations. The following image shows an example of available inventory levels across store branch locations.
If you'd like your online storefront to show product availability at the individual branch level, refer to the Setting up Branch Level Availability topic.
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