Yireo - Extensions, tutorials and blog for Magento and Joomla!

MageBridge Private Sales

With Magento Enterprise Edition, one of the primary selling points is it's ability to Private Sales: As soon as a customer logs in, that customer gets access to a specific set of products. Well, you can built the same with MageBridge. Here's how.

The thing about Store Connectors

Within MageBridge, there is a specific type of extension called Store Connectors that allow you to determine which Magento store is loaded into Joomla!. Usually these connectors are used to connect the multilingual functionality of Joomla! (JoomFish, Nooku) to Magento.

A Magento store for a specific Joomla! usergroup

But there's also a Store Connector for Joomla! usergroups. Many users don't know it's there, but it's actually very cool. When a customer belongs to a specific Joomla! usergroup, you can use the Store Connector to load a specific Magento store for that customer.

The main thing you need to do, is configure a new Store Relation - label it for instance Private Sales. Within the editing form, you can easily select the right Magento store and the right Joomla! user group. Save the connector and you're done.

Some pitfalls

While this easily replicates the enterprise feature of Private Sales, there are some pitfalls here. For instance, as soon as the customer has logged in, the old store is replaced with the new private store. So if the old store contained products A and B, and the private store contains C, the customer only sees product C. This is normal behaviour even in Magento Enterprise but might still give unexpected results.

Another issue is that neither Magento Community Edition nor MageBridge offer advanced permissions per category. This means that all the products and categories that are part of the Private Store, can still be accessed. Luckily there are some third party Magento extensions that allow you to bypass this problem.

Conclusion

While MageBridge offers Private Sales out of the box, it requires some effort to get it working in real time. But it certainly opens up a lot of marketing possibilities. Hope you enjoy them as much as we do.