Setting the boundaries between suppliers and dealers

Dealer was sold to suppliers, who provided licences and products to their dealer networks. The supplier was the paying customer, but each dealer ran its own business and served its own customers. Their requirements could pull in different directions.

Suppliers generally wanted broad control over their networks. Dealers wanted room to manage their own prices and promotions, and to protect the customer relationships they had built.

My work was to understand both sides, negotiate workable boundaries and turn those agreements into settings for suppliers and dealers.

Supplier support needed context

Supplier access had a practical purpose. A dealer could run into a difficult frame configuration or validation errors they could not resolve themselves. When the supplier stepped in to help, they needed enough information to understand the quote and fix the problem confidently.

At the same time, dealers did not necessarily want to expose their customers' names, addresses and phone numbers. We had to consider what suppliers needed for support alongside what dealers needed to keep private.

Pricing within the supplier's rules

Depending on the business model, suppliers could set minimum and maximum margins, recommended retail prices, discounts and promotions. Dealers could have their own promotional arrangements, which sometimes conflicted with those policies.

One concern was a dealer charging substantially less than other dealers ordering from the same supplier. Suppliers wanted controls over how pricing worked across their network.

Supplier policies were reflected in the network settings. During their first registration, dealers had to accept the supplier's terms before they could operate. They could then manage their prices, discounts and promotions within the configured boundaries.

Protecting the dealer's customer relationships

The supplier was not always the larger business. A medium-sized manufacturer could supply a large retail chain, which changed the commercial balance and the willingness to share customer information.

I worked through requirements from both sides and negotiated with suppliers to protect dealer information. We agreed with several major suppliers that sensitive private information in a quote would be hidden from them, and made that standard system behaviour.

Supplier policy settings

Define the pricing boundaries for the dealer network, with dealers accepting the supplier's terms during registration.

Dealer sharing controls

Let the dealer administrator configure what information is exposed to the supplier, with the choice applying to the whole dealer account.

Sharing depended on the business model

Keeping information private could not become a blanket restriction. Some dealers operated as dropshippers and needed to pass full quote information to the supplier for fulfilment.

I gave dealer administrators controls over what they shared, configured for the whole account. This let the settings reflect how that dealer worked with its supplier, including arrangements where full information needed to be conveyed.

A small interface with substantial work behind it

I added policy-related settings to the supplier interface and sharing controls to the dealer interface. On screen, these were a few additional checkboxes and dropdowns.

Defining those controls involved understanding pricing policies, support workflows, customer confidentiality and the exceptions created by different business models. The resulting settings expressed the agreements we had reached with suppliers while giving dealers control over how they operated within them.