advice needed

[firecaptain]

Advise needed.
I work for and sell Fire Department uniforms.

On my site that I am building I have ON DUTY and OFF DUTY items for sell.

The ON DUTY you must have a password and username, the OFF DUTY will be open for everyone.

The way my Webmaster has it, it takes two separate logs INS to make a purchase, I believe that this may turn my coworker away from the site, one is to get into the ON DUTY and the other is to make a purchase.

Does any one know if this can be simplified, by allowing them in to see the ON DUTY items and when they want to make a purchase they could register and request a password, and I could send them a password manually within 24 hours after confirming that they do work for our Fire Department.

Does Zen Cart allow you to manually send password login info? And do I need to have two carts on one site for security reason mentioned above, my Webmaster thinks so.

Is that the best way.

[afo]

I've been thinking about this. I don't see a simple way to do it other than having two separate Zen Carts: one for firefighters only and one for everyone.

[gjh42]

I wonder if you could tweak the function of the Discount Groups and add a check in the add to cart that compares the category with the customer group status? For categories in a list, the customer would have to be a member of the group.

This would require the firefighters to log in (and already be approved for the group) before adding uniforms to their cart, but otherwise would be seamless.

For security, you might want to run the check again at checkout time, in case there is a way to modify the order without going through the add to cart function.

This shouldn't be too hard for an experienced PHP coder, and would certainly save maintenance on two sites over the long run.

[afo]

Nice idea, Glenn. I was wondering if the dual pricing mod could be tweaked, but the discount groups might work nicely. The trick would be to either not display the fire-fighter only products to the general public OR to have the fire-fighter only products as a showcase to the general public.

[gjh42]

Yes, actually that would be better, to skip the add button for those products unless the customer is a logged-in firefighter.

[afo]

Ideally, but I don't know how to get there from here.