How to Configure Miscellaneous Settings for the B2B Portal

Where to find the settings

Now, what about miscellaneous settings? What can you configure the B2B portal to do? I'm going to go to System Settings in the bottom left-hand side. We've already gone over how a lot of the things in my profile settings get applied to the B2B portal, especially the logo and a lot of these addresses. But let's go over some of the other things, starting with B2B Portal Settings.

Default product template

There's a global setting for the product template. This is the default product template: if a company or contact doesn't have a template applied, this default product template is used.

Approval process

Ignore the naming here. We call it "client purchase order," but these are wholesale sales orders, the B2B portal orders. This setting is Override Approval Process, and it's actually the default for all system settings. This will likely change in the future, and we'll probably roll it up under global approval settings, but for now, this is how approvals work.

You can configure the portal to have an approval step. With approvals turned on, every order that's submitted has to be approved before it becomes an invoice, or before it pushes to an OMS like ShipStation, another WMS, or QuickBooks. It's just an approval process. By default, it's not turned on, so when somebody submits an order, it just comes through. You'll want to talk with your customer about whether they want that, and what they want the trigger to be for pushing an invoice to QuickBooks or a sales order to ShipStation.

Checkout messages

Next are the payment instructions that pop up in the B2B portal, the display message, your company footer, and the text description that shows on the checkout page, which is custom text for the cart details. These are notes you can add to give the customer better visibility if they're checking out and potentially confused. This is all pretty straightforward and shows up on the checkout page.

For example, if I add one of each of these items to my cart with bulk add to cart, a lot of what you're seeing on this checkout page is configurable in System Settings: the footer, the text description at checkout and, obviously, the logo right there.

Checkout options

This next part is really important. There are a few settings on the checkout page that probably don't make sense unless I explain them.

Allow add to cart for zero item price. Some people use the portal in a way where there's no price for some customers, like creating a removal order. There's no concept of a price, so we had to allow this. The default logic is that you should have to pay for something, but if you just want to put in a removal order or an order request without caring about price, toggle this on and you can add $0 items to your cart.

Allow add to cart for out-of-stock items. This is for people who don't want to do pre-orders the conventional way. Luminous does have a way to do pre-orders, but if you'd rather just let customers add out-of-stock items to put them on backorder, do your own version of a pre-order, or stack up as many orders as possible without worrying about stock, you can. The portal won't let you add out-of-stock items unless you toggle this on.

Allow checkout for zero order total. This is the finishing touch on the zero-price feature. Not only can customers add $0 items to their cart, they can also check out when the entire order total is zero. You'd be surprised how many clients use it like that.

Allow no-payment checkouts. This is a big one. Luminous has a really flexible payment flow in the B2B space. Say a customer places an order in the B2B portal and you don't want to collect payment there. You want the order to come through, auto-generate an invoice, and push it to QuickBooks, where you already have automatic payments set up. We can do that. Or maybe you want the order to come in, get approved, and then take payment over the phone. That's what this is for. I wouldn't be surprised if most of our customers use no-payment checkout. You submit an order, it gets approved, and then you use whatever payment method you want: manually charging over the phone, which you can do in Luminous by clicking Add Payment on the invoice, or auto-pushing the invoice to QuickBooks, collecting payment there and pulling it back into Luminous.

Show credit card form. If you're going to do credit card processing, linking up with Authorize.net or CyberSource and requiring a transaction at checkout, you'll need to show this form.

Enable unpaid orders approval process. This lets an unpaid order still go through the same approval process.

Show inventory numbers

Below that is Show Inventory Numbers, which is really important. If this isn't toggled on, we only show a stock status: in stock or out of stock. If it is toggled on, we show the real numbers. Some people prefer not to show the actual inventory count, just a simple in stock or out of stock. You can set this at the warehouse group level, right here.

Order notifications for your staff

Another very important setting is notifications: staff to receive B2B portal invoice notifications, and you can schedule them. This is the notification for when somebody places an order. Again, some of these terms are confusing. It says "invoice notifications" because an order that comes through the portal automatically creates an invoice, which then auto-generates a sales order. I know it's confusing. But if you're wondering, "How do I get notified when somebody places an order?" this is it, and you can set it for a specific time.

Notifications for customer contacts

There are also some lesser-known notifications on contacts. When I add a new contact, I have the options Receive Client Quotation Email, Receive Client Purchase Order Email and Receive Client Purchase Order Invoice Email. These let the contact receive notifications when they take certain actions.

Honestly, the quotation one doesn't really apply. It's old Luminous code, so just ignore it. The purchase order email is sent when they place an order, and the invoice email is sent when the order comes through as an invoice in Luminous. These are important. If a contact wants to be notified automatically that their order has come through, make sure to check these when you set up the contact.