Customer groups

Customer groups let you manage contacts and apply group-specific pricing and personalization.

Create customer groups from the Create Customer or Create Organization view under the Customers tab. When on the Create Customer or Create Organization page, select the Customers (users) or organizations that are associated with a customer group. When working with variants, assign special prices for selected customer groups.

Classes in this topic are available in the following namespaces:

• Mediachase.Commerce.Customers
• Mediachase.BusinessFoundation.Common

CustomerGroup is available as a field for both customer and organization records. The CustomerContact class exposes this field as CustomerGroup, and the Organization class exposes it as OrgCustomerGroup, with get and set public accessors available for both. These fields use a descriptive string value representation of the CustomerGroup to which a customer or organization belongs.

Internally, the field stores the strings as integers that map to the string values, so the acceptable values are limited by that mapping. But the acceptable values can be expanded at runtime. This capability is provided through the Business Foundation (BF) library. The acceptable values are shared between the two fields as the ContactGroup MetaEnum type. See MetaEnum class to learn about working with the BF dynamic enum implementation.

As a BF field, CustomerGroup does not exist in the database in the initial installation but is added when you run AutoInstallMetaDataModule during initial site load. The default values available in the field are included in code in the enum CustomerGroup.eContactGroup, although the enum is of limited use otherwise. The eContactGroup enum is fixed at compile time and does not change at runtime when the list is edited in the application or in code by external processes.

The accessor properties on the Organization and CustomerContact are the preferred means of accessing these data. If you need to access the values directly, use EntityObjectHelper.GetStringEntityEnumPropertyValue(). The field name for the CustomerContact version of the BF field is stored as a constant in ContactEntity.FieldCustomerGroup, and the equivalent field name for the Organization Business Foundation field is stored as a constant in OrganizationEntity.FieldOrgCustomerGroup.

The CustomerContact class has an additional get-only property, EffectiveCustomerGroup, which combines these data.

• If the CustomerContact is associated with an Organization, and that organization has a CustomerGroup assigned, then EffectiveCustomerGroup returns the Organization's CustomerGroup.
• If no Organization is assigned to the CustomerContact or if the assigned Organization does not have a CustomerGroup assigned, then EffectiveCustomerGroup returns the CustomerGroup recorded on the CustomerContact record itself, if any.

This evaluation is not recursive on the Organization hierarchy, so only the Organization to which the CustomerContact belongs directly is considered. Any parent Organizations of that Organization are ignored.

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Note

Pricing evaluates customer group membership based on EffectiveCustomerGroup, so use EffectiveCustomerGroup instead of CustomerGroup where possible.

For information about contacts and organization in the user interface, see Contacts and Organizations in the Customers (UI) section.