Online Customer Segmentation
Many online stores need to categorize their customers. A common scenario is wholesale & retail, where wholesalers get pricing discounts. Let’s review how the popular platforms handle this.
- With Magento you can have unlimited groups, pricing can be assigned at group level or product level & SKU level pricing can be bulk imported. All group functionality is included in the Magento Open Source eCommerce edition.
- Shopify has no customer group functionality out of the box besides the ability to tag customers & filter by tag. For group pricing you’ll need an app from the Shopify App store, Bold makes a good one that will run $30-70/month
- BigCommerce “Customer Groups” includes many features like Magento and is built into the “Plus” plan. The only setback is that the bulk data importer doesn’t allow for SKU level group pricing. If you have many products you’ll need to use percentage or fixed price discount at the category level. Alternatively you can use “Price Lists” available on Enterprise plans, use the API or manually via the backend.
- WooCommerce doesn’t either come with customer groups but most functionality can be added with a few WP plugins including user level permissions & group/product level pricing.