b2c evaluation book store example

[meltindar]

Hi all,

I'm new around here and up to now I was able to find everything I was interested in about Sugar.
Right now my company is evaluating various CRM's for b2c relationship model. I read in some of the threads that sugar and most of other CRM's are supporting mainly b2b and you need some workarounds to get it to work as you would like if you want b2c (e.g. duplicating Contacts to Accounts, using notes for sales descriptions etc.). We would be also interested in purchasing Pro edition and took a trial of it.
But I never found some (even basic) example of Sugar implemented in real life using b2c.

Anyway here's the scenario:

Our client has a book store. Sales in question are fairly small, customer never buys more then 3 books for example.
Let's say that our customer wants to do a monthly check for all their customers that spent more then 100$ and create an email campaign for those customers offering them a discount or something like that. Is it doable without massing the workarounds?
Also is it possible to create a discount for certain Contacts based on how much money they spent?
Is it possible to create discount based on Contacts at all?
Which modules is right to use for sales decription (Products in Pro edition seems ok but what about CE)?

I guess Pro would give better usability but I need to know that Sugar can do this (I have a Pro trial account) so if someone can indulge me I would be very grateful.

Thanks,
Stevan

[Kasinetz]

Steven,

To determine how the best way to handle B2C depends on if you need to support a model that is both B2B and B2C. For example, some customers are individuals and other customers are contacts that belong to an Account.

If you only use B2C, then you can use the account module for everything. There's no need to use contacts. You can hide those fields and subpanels.

If you need both B2B and B2C there are different options. The easiest way to support that without any coding or changing the application is to associate all individuals with one account called "Individual". It's not the most elegant solution, but it works. Another way to create an account behind the scenes for each customer.

Regarding your campaign questions, CE does not include reports. With Pro or Enterprise you can create reports that are used as the input for campaigns. For example, customers in GA that have purchased things this month. With reports, you cannot set filter criteria for totals. You can only filter at the row level. The products module would be the one you want.

What you want could be accomplished by creating a report showing customer total purchases for a given month. That report could be exported to Excel, sorted and filtered. From Excel, you could import the file back into Campaign Management as a prospect list and then send a campaign.

You could also add a few custom fields to the account (or even a new module). Whenever a purchase is made, these fields would be updated to reflect current month, last month, YTD purchases, etc. It is denormalizing the database, but it makes reporting and campaigns very easy.

You can create discounts based on customer spend. It would require some custom code, but the code is very simple. Whenever a customer is selected for an order, the code would dynamically check the customer total purchases for a given time frame and then fill in a discount amount. it's not out of the box, but it's pretty easy to implement.

Hope this helps,
Kaz
VP Sales Engineering SugarCRM

[meltindar]

Hi Kaz,

Thank you very much for your fast, thorough and helpful reply. I have some follow ups.

We need only B2C model for this system we need to implement. Also we are trying to get a setup where we would need as little custom coding as possible.

For our business model using only accounts would give us some problems and very little benefits. As Products module would give us best solution for tracking sales first thing is that during report creating you cannot join Account and Products tables but Contacts can. Second thing is that targets of email campaigns can only be Contacts, Leads and custom Targets (here we could maybe export Accounts and then import them as Targets but that's another workaround). Not to mention little things like salutation, first and last name are all missing in Account (though this can be solved with custom fields). And since we don't need Tasks, Meetings, Quotes etc which I read in another threads are connected only to Accounts I think that Contacts would be a better solution. If I'm missing something please tell me I still don't have a complete insight into the system.
I was very pleased to see the Create from report feature for adding campaign targets as that's just what we need.

I also tested CE today with 20k Contacts (added through SOAP) and it worked very fast. Hope it's same on Pro edition

Regards,
Stevan