Taking phone orders as a buyer

Wholesale customers phone their orders in. Rather than have a rep guess at the customer’s contract prices or hunt through a catalog, you can open your own storefront inside that buyer’s account and build the cart they would have built themselves.

This is an Advanced module and it is off by default.

Turn it on

1. Go to Settings → B2B wholesale → Advanced modules.

2. Turn on View storefront as a customer.

3. Save.

Only staff who can manage companies can use it: Administrator, or an access level that carries company management (Store manager, Operations). See which of your staff can manage companies.

Start a session

Open the company under Companies, go to the Buyers card, and choose View storefront as this buyer. If the buyer covers more than one branch, pin the branch you are ordering for.

Your storefront opens as that person. A dealer phones in a ₹1,45,000 order: your rep views the storefront as Ravi, pinned to Nashik, sees ₹412 a case instead of ₹560, and builds the cart against Nashik’s catalog, order multiples and approved addresses.

On account pages the session carries a banner naming the customer and the company, with an End button. End it when you are done rather than leaving it open on a shared machine.

What the rep can and cannot do

The session is bounded by that buyer’s own permissions. Anything the buyer’s account could not do, the session cannot do either — the same catalog, the same prices, the same order limits, the same approved addresses, the same payment terms, the same readiness checks.

Three things are deliberately withheld:

• The buyer’s rewards and personal store credit cannot be used. They are left exactly as they were.
• The session cannot switch to Purchasing personally. It is a company buying session only.
• It is excluded from analytics, so your reports are not polluted by rep traffic.

Limits

Caution

A session ends after 30 minutes. Start a new one if the call runs long — anything already in the cart belongs to the buyer’s account and is still there.

The session is recorded, but there is no screen in the admin to read that log. If you need a visible trail of who took which order, note it on the order yourself.

When to use a draft order instead

Viewing the storefront as a buyer is for taking the order at their own prices. If the call is really a negotiation — a price you are agreeing on the phone, or a one-off freight arrangement — build a draft order instead and send the invoice link, so the numbers you agreed are the numbers that stand.

For a price the buyer asked for in writing, use quotes — but note that a quote always starts from the buyer’s own checkout, so it is not something a rep can open on their behalf.