Buyers & invitations

A buyer is one of your existing customers who has been granted access to purchase for a company location. There is no separate wholesale login: the buyer signs in with the same passwordless (one-time code) account any customer uses, then picks who they are purchasing for.

A manually created company starts Pending with no buyer. Finish the company and first-location setup, activate it, then add buyers. Adding a buyer grants access but does not override lifecycle or ordering-readiness blockers.

Caution

The seller-admin Add buyer dialog still picks an existing customer. If the person is not a customer yet, create the record first at Customers → Add customer, let them apply through the wholesale application form, or bring them in with bulk import.

A Location admin takes a different path: from their Company screen they can invite a new teammate by email. The platform links an existing shopper with that email when one exists, or creates the minimum customer identity when one does not.

One customer belongs to one company. A person who buys for two different businesses needs a second email address, which creates a second customer record.

Convert a customer into a company

The fastest start with someone who already buys from you: on the Companies page choose Convert a customer (or use the button on the customer’s own page), pick the customer, and optionally bring their past personal orders across. It creates the company, its first location, and their buyer access in one step, and makes them the company’s main contact.

Suresh Kirana has been buying ₹60,000 a month at retail. You convert him: company “Suresh Kumar”, location “Main”, 14 past orders carried over. He starts on Pay at checkout until you set terms and credit on the location.

The access email is a deliberate tick during conversion, so a long-standing customer is never surprised by a wholesale email before you have finished setting up.

Add a buyer

1. Open the company under Companies and, in the Buyers card, choose Add a buyer.

2. Pick the customer. Only existing customers appear here.

3. Set the Role — Buyer or Location admin. See buyer roles for exactly what each one sees.

4. Choose the Location they may purchase for, or turn on Company-wide access to cover every location including ones you add later.

5. Optionally tick Add all eligible past personal orders to this location (see below).

6. Leave the notify box — Email the customer that they can start placing company orders — ticked, and confirm.

You add [email protected] as a Buyer at Nashik. He signs in and sees ₹412 a case instead of ₹560, on Nashik’s own payment terms.

Once someone is a buyer, Company purchasing only decides whether they can still shop for themselves. It is on by default in Settings → B2B wholesale, which means a person who belongs to a company buys only for that company — the Purchasing personally option disappears from their account. Turn it off if you want the same person to be able to place private orders as well. Customers who are not company buyers are unaffected either way.

Buyer-managed teammates

A Location admin can manage the roster for the branch currently selected in their account:

1. Open Account → Company → Teammates.
2. Enter an email, choose Buyer or Location admin, and invite.
3. Change a teammate’s role later, or revoke that teammate at this location.

The grant is always location-scoped. It cannot create company-wide access, touch another branch, change the company’s main contact, or grant a capability the acting admin does not hold. Location admins also cannot change or revoke their own access. Changing or revoking branch A preserves an independent grant and billing-contact designation at branch B. A plain Buyer gets a searchable, read-only roster with no teammate controls, and every write is re-authorized server-side.

If the branch is not ordering-ready, the access grant still exists but the invite email is held. The screen reports the warning, and the membership stays in the same Not notified state used by seller-created invitations.

Note

There are still only two roles. Buyer-managed teammates remove routine roster work from the merchant, but they do not add finance, approver, accounts-payable, budget or custom-role workflows.

The wholesale access email

When Notify is selected, adding or inviting a buyer queues one transactional email: it tells them they now have wholesale access at your store, names their company, and carries a Sign in to shop button (one-time code, no password to set). The access grant, durable email job, and invitation timestamp are accepted in one database transaction, so a process restart cannot leave a committed “notified” buyer with no delivery job.

Three things to know about it:

• The wording is fixed. It is not editable in Settings → Notifications. You can untick Notify for an individual grant, but there is no editable invitation template.
• Seller admin has no separate Resend button. Run Add a buyer on the same person with the notify box ticked. In the buyer portal, a Location admin sees Send invite for a teammate whose state is Not notified and can retry it after readiness is repaired.
• It is held back until the branch can take an order. The Buyers table shows either the time the email was durably queued or Not notified. Provider delivery is retried from that queue; this timestamp is not a claim that the recipient’s mail server accepted the message.

Add Ravi before Nashik has an approved address and the grant is still created, but a toast says the invite email was not sent yet. Nothing goes out until the location’s Ordering incomplete list is clear — see ordering readiness. “Not notified” almost always means readiness, not a lost email.

Main contact and billing contact

These are two different jobs.

• Main contact is the company’s account owner and the fallback for reminders. Set it from the Buyers table with Make main contact.
• Billing contact overrides that for one branch, and is who receives the payment reminders on that branch’s invoices. Set it at Location → Addresses and billing contact → Set billing contact. It must be an active buyer with access to that branch.

Sharma Distributors’ invoices are chased by Anita in accounts, not by the branch buyer. Make her Pune’s billing contact and the Net 30 reminders on ₹3,40,000 land with her.

Linking past personal orders

While adding a buyer — or converting a customer — you can tick Add all eligible past personal orders to this location.

• You see a preview first: how many orders, over what date range, and the totals per currency.
• Linking associates that person’s complete eligible personal history with the chosen location, at one fixed cutoff. You cannot pick individual orders.
• It changes where orders are visible, not how they were sold. Prices, tax, discounts, payments, refunds and fulfillment are untouched, and each order is badged Linked past order.
• Cancelled, test, guest and existing company orders never link.

Suresh’s 14 personal orders worth ₹8,40,000 attach to “Main”, so the account does not start blank and a colleague can reorder from them. Review what has been linked in the company’s Linked personal order history panel.

Note

Linked history is visibility only. It never counts toward B2B sales figures, credit exposure or the company’s spend totals — those still read ₹0 until the first real company order.

Buyers you imported

Buyers created by bulk import are never emailed and always get the plain Buyer role. Migrate 240 dealers with 900 buyer emails in one sheet and not one of those 900 people knows they can sign in. Tell them yourself, or re-run Add a buyer on the company page with the notify box ticked.

Removing a buyer

Remove on the Buyers card revokes membership:

• New company purchasing stops immediately, including for sessions that are already signed in.
• Their company quote list, negotiation threads, PDFs and attachments stop immediately too. A stale signed-in session cannot keep reading or replying to a former employer’s negotiation.
• Their personal account and personal orders are untouched. Orders they placed for the company stay on the company’s history.
• A checkbox — Also remove their linked personal orders from company history — is unticked by default, so linked personal orders stay visible to the company after the person has gone. Tick it if that is not what you want.

Sharma’s purchasing manager joins a competitor. You remove her and untick nothing, so her 37 linked personal orders stay; tick the box and they leave with her. Either way the 14 wholesale orders she placed remain on the company.

Re-adding the same customer later reactivates their membership with fresh access. Past-order links are never re-created automatically.

Note

A customer with a company membership (or company order history) cannot be merged with another customer record — the identity is part of the company’s audit trail. Resolve duplicates before adding the customer as a buyer.