How to use a private store

Understand how to use private stores.

A Private Store offers a custom shopping experience with special discounts, product assortment, or merchandising offers. It also limits purchases to authorized shoppers. A Private Store (also known as Purchase Plan) is an online store that caters exclusively to a known group of customers.

The Private Stores feature allows you to:

• Tap into new market segments

• Avoid channel conflicts with the minimum advertised price (MAP)

• Liquidate overstocked items or items nearing the end of life

• Strengthen partner relationships by offering discounts to their employees

• Use purchase limits to prevent abuse of a discounted product price

• Fast setup of new offering without Digital River involvement

You can use Global Commerce to create a private store for a specific audience, such as B2B stores, VIP stores, employee stores, and so on. A private store allows you to provide special pricing on specific products for a select group of shoppers. You can define which products you want to show in the Private Store and the price of those products. You can also control how shoppers access the Private Store.

The site owner, who has a Private Store Manager role in the Global Commerce user interface (UI), configures private stores at the site level. Private stores allow sites to sell to a target market. Sites can deploy, rotate, and retire private stores to suit current product marketing trends.

Note: In the Global Commerce UI, private stores used to be called purchase plans, and the APIs reflect the former nomenclature in version 1 (v1).