My last email reviewed the process of setting up your business. After this is done, the most common questions we hear are usually along the lines of “how should I set up my websites?” The question most users fall along these lines:

  • What do you mean by a customer website?
  • Is every customer a different website?
  • What's the difference between public and private websites?
  • What's an employee website?

In this email, I'll give you an overview of websites and try to answer those questions in the process. If you are typical, reviewing this information plus setting up your initial websites will take you about 10 to 30 minutes to complete.

A Primer on Customer Websites

You probably have different groups of customers you want to serve. How you organize them into Customer Websites and Customer Website Groups is one of the things that new businesses are unsure of. The following example may help illustrate how most businesses set them up.

Suppose you had two large customers you wanted to put online: Super Burger and Big Hardware. Super Burger might be a franchise or chain with tens or hundreds of locations. Big Hardware might be a large local retailer with 4 or 5 locations. Also suppose that you want to create a public storefront for the general public and smaller customers.

In this case, you probably set up three (3) Customer Websites, one for each of these customer groups: Super Burger, Big Hardware, and Public Store.

customer_website_simple_graphic.png_width600

Each location within Super Burger and Big Hardware would be a separate Company, and each person at that location is a Contact. You can designate certain contacts as super users with powers to work in all of the companies within their website. These users are called Website Administrators, which is a great way to give corporate users the ability to work with orders for all companies within their website.

For any website, you can decide if it should be limited to customers with pre-existing accounts or whether anyone with the web address can view and place orders. The former case is called as private website, the latter a public website. For each website you can choose whether it is public or private. Usually, you will create all your customer-specific websites at private sites because you will want to limit access to the information. Often, general websites are deployed as public sites and linked to from the main site - but you are in full control of these decisions with Cyrious Online.

One other special website is the employee website. As the name implies, this is used by employees to log in. It provides unified access to all of your customer websites. One of your employees (with permissions) can place an order for any company on any customer website. Likewise, she can monitor, track, and otherwise work with orders from any website.

**Employee v Contact**: Cyrious will always use the term employee to refer to your co-workers or employees. Likewise, the term contact will always be used to refer to the employees of your customers.

I know it's a lot to take in, but there is one more level to think about, Customer Website Groups.

To extend the example, if Super Burger is large enough it may not be sufficient to put them in a single website. Perhaps Super Burger has corporate stores, and is franchising in two regions. Franchisees often have different payment and approval rules (they pay themselves but only need artwork approved) than corporate stores (which are paid by corporate but must have orders approved before they are made). These types of distinctions require different customer websites.

Even though they are different websites, it is helpful to organize together so we will create a Customer Website Group called Super Burger and put all three (3) customer websites in them.

customer_website_group_simple_graphic.png_width600

Here are the formal rules for when you need to set up different customer websites. You need to create separate websites when:

  • You need to offer a different product catalogs.
  • You need to have different pricing for the same products.
  • You have super-users (website administrators) at the corporate level and you need to limit which orders they can see.

Setting up Customer Websites

When you waded through the information above, first sketch out what you think your website and website groups will be. I have found a box diagram similar to those shown above is a very helpful tool to help think everything through.

Creating customer websites is very easy with Cyrious Online.

First, look for the settings button on the left. Click the Settings button to open the settings page where you can begin setting up your website business.
Under Main Setup, find the section “Set up Your Customers”. This will give you the steps you'll need to get started.
main_setup_-_set_up_your_customer.png_width500
Click on the first link to Setup your Customer Websites and Website Groups.

From here, you can create new Customer Website Groups and add new Websites.
|| customer_website_listing.png_width500 || > Note: Your screen may look different based on your specific websites and groups, but the structure should be the same.

From this screen, you can:

  • Click on Add Customer Website Group to create a new website group.
  • Click on Add Customer Website to create a new customer website.
  • Click on the Website Group Name to edit the website group.
  • Click on the Website name to edit the website or change its group.

Step-by-step details for this process can be found on the Cyrious Online WIKI getting_started page. It will walk you through each of these steps and answer the questions you will probably have. If you prefer watching videos, there is also a walk through of the process on the WIKI videos page.

Other Resources

Don't forget the other resources you have at your disposal if you have questions:

  • Online WIKI. The Online WIKI (knowledge base) at http://online.cyriouswiki.com has a lot of resources. Sections you might want to look at include getting_started, training, videos, and the home page.
  • Online Chat. The Online Chat is a great resource for quick answers when you are working in Cyrious Online. All employees will have the Ask Cyrious chat prompt at the bottom of their screen. Click it to open a dialog and chat directly with Cyrious Online's support staff.

If you would rather not receive these emails, please let me know and I'll discontinue them. Otherwise, I'll touch base again in a few days. If you are eager to get ahead, you can view the next guidance email in the series New Customer Guidance - . The previous guidance email can be found new_customer_guidance_-_welcome.

Julie Cifreo

Launch Manager

References

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  • new_customer_guidance_-_understanding_customer_websites.txt
  • Last modified: 2019/01/27 09:38
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