Customer groups

You can organize your customers into groups by different criteria (wholesale clients, B2B, VIP customers, etc.) to give a special storewide discount to the group members. As soon as members of a group log into their customer accounts in your store and visit the shopping cart, the group discount will automatically apply to the products in the cart.

Creating customer groups

A customer group is sort of a label that you can assign to customers in order to group them under certain criteria. You can create as many groups for your customers as you need (VIP, wholesaler, B2B, repeat customer, friends and family, etc.) and assign customers to them. A customer can belong to one group only.

To create a customer group:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → Customer groups.
2. Click +Add new customer group.
3. Enter the name of the group in the new field that appears. Customers which you’ll have assigned to this group will see the group name in their customer accounts in your store.
4. Click Save.

Adding customers to groups

You can view to which group your customers belong and assign customers to groups in the My Sales → Customers section in your Ecwid admin:

Dash means that you haven’t assigned the corresponding customer to any group.

To include a customer in a group:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to My Sales → Customers.
2. Find the customer by email or name.

3. Click on the "-" sign in the Customer group column and select the group:

4. Click Save.

Group members will see what group they belong to and what discount they have when they log into their customer accounts in your store.

Setting up discounts for customer groups

Now that you have customer groups in your store, you can go to your Ecwid admin in  Marketing → Automatic Discounts and create discounts for group members.

Discounts for customer groups can be:

Based on customer group. You can add a flat discount that can be a fixed amount off the usual product price or a percentage off. For example:

Customers from the Wholesalers group have a storewide 10% discount.

Based on customer groups and subtotal. You can add tiered discounts (dollar off or percentage off the regular product price) that depend on order subtotals. For example:

Spend $350 or more, save 3%,
Spend $500 or more, save 5%,
Spend $1000 or more and get $100 off.

To set up a discount for a customer group:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Marketing → Automatic discounts.
2. Click Add discount in the Based on Customer Groups section to add a flat discount or in the Based on Customer Groups and subtotal section to add tiered discounts for various order subtotals.
3. In that section choose the customer group to which you want to offer this discount and specify a  % or $ discount amount in the Discount column:

Click Add discount if you need to add more flat discounts or to include more tiers in the discount table.

If you need to add a subtotal-based discount for another customer group, click Add Discount table.

4. Save the changes.

Once set up, the discount will be available for customers from that customer group. For the group discounts to apply, customers will need to be logged in while shopping. Once they log into their customer accounts in your store, the discount will automatically apply to the products in their shopping carts. Otherwise the store will treat them as regular customers.

Examples

Let's say you sell to regular customers as well as to wholesalers. Wholesalers need to receive discounts depending on how much they buy. You can set it up either with the use of bulk discount pricing that is available to all store visitors or with the help of discounts for customer groups that are available only to logged in group members. In the latter case, your steps to configure the discounts in your Ecwid store would be as follows:

1. Go to  Settings → Customer Groups and create a customer group "Wholesalers".
2. Go to My Sales → Customers, find the profiles of your wholesale customers and assign them to the "Wholesalers" group as instructed above.
3. Go to Marketing → Automatic discounts and create discounts "Based on Customer Groups and Subtotal".

Here is an example of how the setup looks like in the Ecwid admin:

When customers from your Wholesalers group sign in their accounts in your store and go to the cart page, they will see that the discount has been automatically applied to their order subtotal (if the subtotal qualifies for a discount).

Here is an illustration of how members of the group called Wholesalers see the applied discount in the cart: