Wholesaler wants to have a members-only catalog

[adentone]

Is there an easy way to require a login / registration before they can see the catalog?

Also, is there a good way to link to the testimonials via a clean url?
like www.mydomain.com/testimonials/ ??

Thanks

[designwerks]

We have retail and a wholesale site...

In the beginning...

We had one store that had retail pricing and then used discounts for wholesale members... (not a good idea if you want to really seperate retail from wholesale)...

Our solution...

Paid Jamie (Squirrelcart) for a second shopping cart (keeping it all legal)...

Now we hav google and other bots search and find our retail site while we have disabled search engines from finding our wholesale site... When we have members asking and approved for wholesale status - we send them our private URL...

In this way - you control who sees your product etc... Hope this helps...

John

[adentone]

What we'd like to have is a way to authenticate users / clients before they even see the cart.

Here is a mock-up of the home page:
http://www.dentone.net/clients/ght/
Note the "Wholesale Login" at the top-right.
Ideally, they could login there and be directed to the store.

My client does not sell retail at all - only wholesale.

We currently have the store in a password-protected directory (using htpass, etc) but this was intended only as a temporary solution.

Please advise.
Thanks

[Jamie]

There is no simple solution to this. You need custom programming.

I'd recommend creating a 'Wholesale' group in our control panel. Then, adding a user account to that group would designate that they can see the store.

With this function, you can tell if the user is in that group and act accordingly:

<?php
if (security_level('Wholesale')) {
     print "Welcome, wholesale customer.";
} else {
     print "You are not logged in as a wholesale customer";
}
?>

I'd recommend putting something in the store_main.tpl.php template file to hide the normal store content when they are not logged in as a member of that group. You would need to display our login form code when they are not logged in (same code in the Account Options navigation block in the control panel). If they are logged in, you could show the normal store content.

The above is a very basic overview of the approach. To implement this would require some PHP skills and familiarity with our code. If you'd like a price for us to implement something like this for you, please send an email via our contact page and we can get you a price:
http://www.squirrelcart.com/contact.php