Contracts enable a customer organization to purchase products from a store or a group of stores at a specified price for a specified period of time under specific conditions. WebSphere Commerce provides the ability to record and deploy contracts that have been negotiated. Use WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to manage contracts.
A contract consists of the following elements:
- Profile
- The contract profile contains the identifying information for the contract. This information includes a unique name for the contract, a short description, and a time period for which the contract is valid.
- Participants
- Contract participants are the organizations that take part in the contract. There is a buyer organization, a seller organization, and contacts at both organizations.
- Terms and conditions
- Contract terms and conditions are the rules that cover the actual implementation of the contract. Contract terms and conditions cover such information as product pricing, returns and refunds, payment, shipping, and order approval.
- Attachments
- Contract attachments cover any information not covered by the previous elements such as file attachments that provide additional information about the contract and any general remarks about the contract. WebSphere Commerce stores Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) for contract attachments, not the actual attachments.
- Reference
- A contract can refer to another contract to share its terms and conditions. For example, contract A can refer to contract B. Thus, a buyer who is entitled to contract A will be entitled to all the terms and conditions from contract A, as well as to all the terms and conditions in contract B.
All contracts are associated with business accounts. Contracts can not be created for customers you have not created an account for.
Different items in a single order may be purchased under different contracts. Buyers can select the contract they shop under at either the start of the shopping flow or when they add an item to their order, depending on the store design. When purchasing items under different contracts the following rules apply:
- Contracts for all items in an order must share at least one payment method. If the contract for an item does not share a payment method, the buyer can not add that item to the order. Only the payment methods share by all items in an order can be used to pay for the order.
- All items in an order must come from contracts belonging to the same business account or the store default contract.
When creating contracts for WebSphere Commerce, it is important to understand the business model in which you store is based, as well as the participants, usages, and XML elements for each business model, as outlined in the following table:
Business model |
Contract XML element |
Usage |
Participants |
---|---|---|---|
B2B direct | BuyerContract | Organization buyer (Default) |
|
Demand chain | ReferralContract | Referral |
|
| HostingContract | Reseller |
|
Supplier chain | HostingContract | Supplier |
|