Thoughts on this scenario please

The business produces working clothing. Individual clients can have their own logo added to their garments.

All generic products to be available to view by everyone, but access to specific products restricted (i.e. a potential new customer visits the site and decides he wants to buy the shirts and supply his own logo; when he needs a resupply, he comes back to the site, and as an existing customer, sees ONLY "his" shirts and "his" prices)

"His" prices may be different from the generic, and from other clients (so I'm not sure that Group Discounts is the answer here)

Any ideas as to whether it's possible to set up ZC this way? I can't seem to come up wit a working solution myself.

"His" prices may be different from the generic, and from other clients (so I'm not sure that Group Discounts is the answer here)
Whle I have not set up more than a handful of groups - I am not aware that there is a limit - but have not physically checked this - If no limit I do not see where this would not work....maybe not as indicating the corrected directly but as a %discount known to the customer.

That sounds reasonable - now, any way of restricting specific customer to a category (short of hard-coding a conditional statement for each client... although, thinking aloud, I suppose it may be feasible to set something up whereby the client's id [email??] could be added in admin alongside the category allowed..would that be possible?)

one customer = one category?? or many categories??

Have to have some mappable index of some type??

Would a simpler solution be possible? The same branded items are sold to every company; all that differs is the logo. So add the url to the logo to registration (or possibly allow an upload of a logo), and then just let them buy the work clothes.

Slightly more fancy, and not too difficult: if customer 5 orders a bunch of shirt number 12,
upload a photo of this shirt to images/5/12.jpg. Look for the existence of this file
when displaying images in tpl_product_info_display and show it if it's there and
the current logged in user is customer 5.

And if you don't like the discounts groups logic, you could break it out by customer id for certain key (high volume) customers. Or just use lots of groups.

Good luck,
Scott

@kobra

I think logically the customer would need access to all "general" categories (in case they want new lines) + his/her specific one (for repeat orders)

@swguy

Thanks - good ideas. It always helps to have a different eye look at these things.

It depends how slick you want it to be. This requirement is close enough to Zen Cart that it wouldn't take a huge amount of coding to do what you suggest.

I don't know enough about group pricing to know if it's the solution to the pricing questions, but very much doubt that there are limited, so Kobra's suggestion seems good on the surface.

You already have logic in the orders history sidebox that shows the products that the customer has brought before. It has one shortfall in that it doesn't attempt to present information about the attributes that were purchased (and I'm guessing colour and size are going to be important here, as well as the logo upload).

However, personally I'd be very tempted to merge this logic with that for one of the centre panel listings modules to create a new module, add in attribute info (which is available since it's displayed on the order info page) and invoke this as the first centre panel box front page only when the customer is logged in.

Thank you all; you've given me some good pointers there.