Portals Module

The Portals module enables you to set up a business-to-business (and business-to-consumer) customer portal Web site that allows you to sell and service your customers over the Internet. It also allows you to set up a supplier portal.

The customer portal supports real-time product availability, multiple price breaks, freight tables, sales taxes, credit checking rules for your customers, multiple units of measure, etc. It allows your customers to order products online using various order pad methods, verify their order status, look up their invoices, and review their account balance.

Orders can also be created on the Advanced Order Entry page by importing from an Excel file that contains product codes in column A and quantities in column B (do not use column headings).

The following tasks must be accomplished before you can run a customer portal.

Customer Portal Category Maintenance

Define and maintain product categories, both parent and subcategories.

Customer Portal Product Maintenance

Define products for sale on the Internet; associate with categories or subcategories.

Portal User Maintenance

Define users and passwords; associate users with a default customer and customer contact.

Customer Portal Site Maintenance

Define site-level controls for the customer portal.

Sensitive information such as logins, passwords, credit card numbers, pricing, etc. can be intercepted during Web communications if proper precautions are not taken, and could potentially result in fraudulent activity. Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption on your Web server to protect all sensitive information. SSL can be implemented by purchasing and installing an SSL certificate from VeriSign. You can purchase a certificate at http://www.verisign.com/ssl/buy-ssl-certificates/index.html. To verify that your Apprise customer portal site is currently using SSL encryption, review the URL of your site. If it starts with https://, then it is using SSL. If it starts with just http://, then it is not.

Other topics related to using the Portals module include:

HTML Basics FAQ

Defines common HTML tags and their uses.

Color Codes FAQ

Describes hexadecimal codes used for color identification.

The menus for the Portals module include the following submenus and programs:

Customer Portal Customer Portal

Product Setup Product Setup

Site Setup Site Setup

Supplier Portal Supplier Portal

Site Setup Site Setup

Module Setup Module Setup