1 Building a Password Protected Wholesale Area Tutorial

Warning: This page applies to the legacy UltraCart Catalog, which was replaced by UltraCart StoreFronts in May 2015. This content is kept only for long-time merchants still running a legacy catalog.
For current storefront and catalog management, see:
StoreFronts User Guide (start here)
StoreFronts Overview (how StoreFronts works, key concepts)
StoreFront Themes & Visual Builder (theme selection, Visual Builder basics)
Storefront File Manager (hosting files in UltraCart)
Creating and Managing Pages (add pages, navigation, layouts)
Menus and Navigation (primary menus, category menus, links)
Widgets and Content Blocks (common widgets, configuration patterns)
Domains, SSL, and StoreFront Publishing (DNS, go-live checklist, environment/publishing flow)
If you’re new to StoreFronts, start with the StoreFronts Overview, then move into Themes & Visual Builder, and finally Pages + Menus as you build out your site structure.

Building a Password Protected Wholesale Area Tutorial

This tutorial will walk you through all the various steps to building a password protected wholesale area. This is one of those topics that cuts across a wide number of segments within the UltraCart platform. We'll touch on:

Configuring pricing tiers
Creating a customer profile associated with the pricing tier
Coding the catalog template for the wholesale page.
Creating a group within your catalog that has restricted permissions
Assigning items to a catalog group
Testing the wholesale page

Configuring pricing tiers

The first thing we need to do is configure a pricing tier on the account for the wholesale customer. Pricing tiers are configured under:

Main Menu → Item Management → Pricing Tiers

Click on the new button as shown below.

On the new pricing tier we will give it the name of "Wholesale", set it to a 40% discount as shown below, and then click save.

Creating a customer profile associated with the pricing tier

The next step in the process is to create a customer profile that has this pricing tier. Customer profiles are managed under:

Main Menu → Customer Profiles → Manage

Click the new button as shown below.

Enter the email for the customer profile, a password, select the Wholesale pricing tier, and then click save.

Coding the catalog template for the wholesale page.

The next step is to create the template for the wholesale page. Templates are managed under:

Main Menu → Catalog → Choose Host → Manage Templates

Click the new button as shown below.

In the template editor name the template "template_wholesale", check the Group and Item boxes, copy the code below into the template field and then click save as shown below.

The code for the sample template is below:

Example Wholesale Catalog Template

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
  <title>Wholesale Page</title>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
  <form name="form1" method="post" action="http://secure.ultracart.com/cgi-bin/UCEditor">
    <input name="MERCHANTID" type="hidden" id="MERCHANTID" value="${merchantID}">
    <h1 align="center">Wholesale Products</h1>

    <div align="center">
      <table>
        <tr>
          <th>Item</th>
          <th>Description</th>
          <th>Cost</th>
          <th>Quantity</th>
        </tr>
#foreach($item in $group.getItems())        
        <tr>
          <td>${item.getMerchantItemID()}</td>
          <td>${item.getDescription()}</td>
          <td><div align="right">${item.getCost()}</div></td>
          <td>
            <div align="center">
              <INPUT NAME="ADD_${item.getMerchantItemID()}" VALUE="" SIZE=8>
            </div>
          </td>
        </tr>
#end        
      </table>
      <p><input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Add Items To Cart"></p>
    </div>
  </form>
</body>
</html>

Creating a group within your catalog that has restricted permissions

The next step is to create a catalog group and assign permissions to it. Go back to the catalog menu and click Manage Catalog Groups as shown below.

Click the add new group button as shown below.

Name the group "Wholesale", give the url code the value "Wholesale", select the root group as the parent, select template_wholesale for the group and item templates, and then click the Permissions button as shown below.

Now select the Wholesale pricing tier and click save as shown below.

Assigning items to a catalog group

Now we need to assign some items to our wholesale catalog group. Navigate to the catalog menu and then click Item Assignment as shown below.

Click on the Wholesale folder on the left, a filing cabinet folder on the right, check the boxes for the items you want to assign and then click the Add Items to Selected Group button as shown below.

Testing the wholesale page

The final step is to test the wholesale page. Navigate back to the Manage Catalog Groups screen by clicking it from the catalog menu as shown below.

Now scroll down to the Wholesale group and click the "open in new window" button as shown below.

Notice that it immediately takes you to a customer profile login screen as shown below.

After the customer logs in the wholesale page will display as shown below.