THE ESSENTIALS

The Business Network includes all partners your business collaborates with.

If your business operates with internal partners - such as branches or resellers - you can optionally set up an internal structure or Merchants. Merchants can fulfill orders, manage their own products for your contacts to order from, and fund their own reward offers. Merchants may also define their own Venues, representing the physical or virtual locations where orders are fulfilled.

Your can also collaborate with other businesses registered on the CRM.COM platform, expanding your network into a B2B Network that supports affiliate commerce and drives greater customer engagement. Send B2B Invitations to other businesses to join as your B2B Merchants, or accept invitations from others, to become a B2B Merchant for their business. B2B Merchants can share products from their product catalogue into yours, transforming your business into a B2B Marketplace. Orders placed by your contacts within your business, are fulfilled by B2B Merchants under a drop-shipment model. B2B Merchants can manage their own products as well as create and manage offers for your contacts.

Open

Now let’s get familiar with some key terms of the Business Network.

Organisations

An organisation in CRM.COM can be a Business, a Merchant, or a B2B Merchant. Each type has different responsibilities in how products are managed, orders are fulfilled, and how contacts are served.

• Business - The business is the tenant that runs CRM.COM to monetise its contacts. The business owns the contacts, creates and manages the Product Catalogue and sets up all business rules for managing Orders, Subscriptions, Billing and more.

• Merchant - Merchant is an internal branch or store (such as franchise stores or resellers) created under the Business to extend its operations by fulfilling orders and participating in awarding the business’s contacts. A Merchant may also have its own products.

• Venue- Venues are either your own or a Merchant’s physical or virtual locations that can sell products and fulfil orders.

Organisation State

An organisation’s state reflects its operational status and controls allowed user actions:

• Active - No restrictions apply.

• Suspend - Certain restrictions apply, but users can log in.

• Inactive - No actions can be carried out by the Organisation, and users can't log in.

See here for a more detailed explanation of each state’s restrictions.

B2B Merchant

A B2B Merchant is a separate, independent business, registered in the CRM.COM platform, that has accepted your invitation to join your network. B2B Merchants may share their products with your business and sell them through your marketplace. B2B Merchants will then be responsible for fulfilling orders taken by your business under a drop shipment model.

B2B Peer

A B2B Peer is the owner of the Business Network. Your business is the B2B Peer for your B2B Merchants. As a B2B Peers, you retain ownership of the contacts and work with other businesses to run joint promotions or provide access to a shared product catalogue.

Masquerading

Masquerading is the ability of an organisation to masquerade as another organisation role that are in a lower hierarchy. So a business can masquerade as a merchant or B2B merchant; or a peer business can masquerade into its B2B merchant to configure catalogues and adjust prices or for troubleshooting purposes.

B2B Marketplace

B2B Marketplace is formed when expand your product catalogue by including offerings of your B2B Merchants.

B2B Affiliate Commerce

B2B Merchants create and fund reward offers for their B2B Peers contacts.

B2B Affiliate Commerce Delegated

B2B Merchants create and fund reward offers for their products, which are granted when B2B Peers sell those products to their own contacts.

B2B Commerce Pool

The B2B Commerce Pool allows sharing of your Commerce Pools with other businesses to use in their reward offers.

B2B Spend

A Business allows its contacts to use funds from their Business Pocket to pay for purchases at other Businesses.

Refer to Appendix A for an example and a B2B Spend scenario diagram.

'Guest' Contacts

If a contact makes a purchase at one business but is registered under another, the purchase is still submitted but for the “guest contact.”

Settlement

Settlement is the process of reconciling (debiting and crediting the organisation account) and transferring funds (within the wallets) between parties after a wallet transaction has taken place. Settlement ensures that each organisation involved in a transaction gets paid or charged correctly, depending on their role (Business, Merchant, B2B Merchant) and the transaction taking place.

Refer to the Settlement manual to find out more.

TAPs

Transaction Acquiring Points are typically used to uniquely identify devices (such as POS terminals) where purchase transactions are captured. TAPs can also support additional actions, like sending receipts to third-party platforms for printing.

When a Purchase Event is posted to CRM.COM, the unique TAP code is used to trace the transaction and identify the originating organisation.

Contact Registry

A Contact Registry holds the personal details of Contacts registered in CRM.COM. The contact registry can be enabled and maintained either at the Service Owner or you Business level. If you want to own the contact registry, then your business has full ownership of the contacts and their details are not shared with any other organisations in the network.

This is an overview of the essential Business Network settings. It's important to note that access to features and actions depends on:

• The user who logs in i.e. whether is a user of your own business or a user of a merchant

• Whether the user is masquerading. See here for permission behaviour while masquerading.

Creating & Managing the Business Network

Managing the Business

You can edit your business’s profile details after signing-in by clicking on your name in the top right-hand corner of the screen and selecting My Business.

Open

Business information screen

Attention should be paid to the following settings:

• Name - The name of your business.

• Logo - Upload your business logo. This will be used to identify your business within the network and can also be used when communicating with your contacts.

• Description - Optionally provide an internal description of the business.

• Phone - Your business’s phone number.

• Email - Your business’s email address.

• Address - If Google Places is configured, search for and select the Business address and Google Place ID.

• Opening Hours - Optionally define the Business’s operating hours for order delivery and pick-up. Use the toggles Is delivery closed? and Is pick-up closed? to temporarily disable these options when needed.

My Business account @CRM.COM

Users with the Owner user role are able to view their business’s financial and CRM.COM Wallet information in the CRM.COM platform.

Open

The business’s account to CRM.COM includes:

• Business – View your financial account, your business’s CRM.COM Wallet, and manage payment methods for funding or payouts. In the Legal section you can see the latest version of the CRM.COM Terms of Service accepted by your business. When terms are updated, the business owner must accept the new version to maintain uninterrupted access to the platform.

• Your Subscription Plan @ CRM.COM – Manage your subscription plan with CRM.COM, including viewing, changing, or cancelling it, as well as checking upcoming bills and billing history.

• CRM.COM Wallet Settlement Transactions – Review wallet settlement transactions from collaborations with other businesses, along with summarised totals based on various settlement transactions.

Open

Managing the Merchant

Back-end users of your business create a Merchant.

Open

Merchant information screen

When creating a Merchant, specify its basic details such as name, logo, phone, email and address. Note that this information is the same as the one available for your business. Additionally, for each Merchant you can specify:

• Create a Merchant Owner user - Create and invite an Owner user for the Merchant on-the-fly. Simply enable the respective toggle, and invite the User by completing their personal information in the area below. This action can also be performed by navigating to Settings > Security > User Roles & Users > Users > Invite User.

Open

Once created, select the Merchant to edit any of the following optional configurations:

• Transaction Acquiring Points - Define the devices where transactions are captured and/or processed on-site.

  • Name - The TAP name.

  • Code - A TAP’s main identification attribute is its code which must be unique.

  • Type: Choose the TAP type:

    • External Reference - Mapped to an external integration. Select from the available types and proceed to configure the IP address and port settings.

    • POS - Represents a Point of Sale terminal, where purchase customer events are captured and submitted to CRM.COM. Each POS terminal usually has a unique code used for identification purposes (determining in which venue is installed); such code should be defined on the TAP code.

    • Receipt Printer - Allows provisioning and printing of CRM.COM orders to an external ESC/POS printer. Print provisioning requires the printer’s IP address and port to be defined on the TAP.

    • Card Terminal - Payment card machine.

To add a TAP for a Business, click on the ‘eye’ icon on the right-hand side of the screen.

Open

• Enable WiFi Network - A Business, Merchant and/or Venue can define whether they support WiFi Networks, typically when offering services such as Internet access, VoIP or IPTV to residential and Business customers). Enabling a WiFi Platform, a set of attributes should be provided:

  • WiFi Platform - Defines the WiFi platform (e.g. Unifi) that such service will be provided.

  • Site Identifier - An ID provided by the WiFi Platform to identify the Organisation and keep track of service usage.

  • WiFi Network - Defines the wireless networks specific to each Organisation's physical location, enabling customers to connect and join these networks. Additional actions can be performed on such networks, such as enabling and/or disabling them.

  • Guest Portal - Defines the portal URL endpoint, where customers will land when joining a WiFi Network. Such a portal is responsible for authenticating customers, granting access to the Internet, or placing an order for additional usage (if already consumed)

• Commercial Terms - Use this section to configure the Merchant’s agreement and settlement settings.

  • Settlement - Choose the settlement timing using the toggle. Besides the Organisation’s settlement method, settlements also take into account the owner of the offer who funds the award.

    • Settle on Award (default, toggle off) – The Merchant is debited, and the award owner is credited when the Contact receives the award.

    • Settle on Spend (toggle on) – The Merchant is debited, and the award owner is credited only when the Contact spends (redeems) the award.

  • Contributions - Specify the percentage of the award amount that the Merchant contributes (is debited) when an award is granted. This percentage can be overridden by defining explicit offers with their own corresponding contribution percentages.

The settlement process charges participating Organisations the cost of awards and creates settlement transactions either in real time or at set time intervals (e.g., daily).

Open

Commercial Terms setting for a Merchant

• Block Merchant - This option is available from the Merchant screen (Commercial Terms options) and allows the Business to block the Merchant from awarding Contacts and Contacts from spending their awards at the Merchant.

• Products not available for sale - Identify any temporarily unavailable products or those that can’t be ordered by contacts by selecting the product and the restricted supply method(s).

Open

Merchant Statement

Because Merchants can have their own accounts, they are able to purchase goods from the Business, subscribe to services, and place orders.

The Statement shows the Organisation’s account and financial activities for a selected period of time and can be exported in PDF or .csv format. To view a Merchant Statement, navigate to Business Network > My Merchants> locate and Edit the Organisation> select the options button > Statement.

Open

View the statement for a Merchant

Managing Venues

These settings are applicable for Venues.

• Venue has the same industry and business scope as its parent - A Venue can inherit its parent’s business-related definitions or, alternatively, define its own.

Open

Venue to inherit settings configured for its parent

Open

Venue has their own configuration settings

• Enable WiFi Network - Does this Venue support services related to Internet access, VoIP and IPTV? Refer to the Merchant section.

Open

• Opening Hours - Refer to the Merchant section to see how to configure opening hours.

• Products not available for sale - Refer to the Merchant/ section to define products unavailable for sale.

Organisation’s Administrative Actions

An organisation can carry out various administrative tasks on its child organisations (e.g., a Business managing its Merchants, or a Merchant managing its Venues). To do this, go to the summary screen showing the child organisations, find the one you want to manage, click the options button, and choose the desired action from the menu.

Open

A Business can perform the following actions for its Merchants and B2B Merchants:

Suspend

The following restrictions apply when a Merchant is suspended:

• Users:

  • Can access the back-end system and perform operations as usual, except creating new contacts, placing new orders, ordering services and activating new reward schemes/reward offers.

  • When attempting to authenticate, a user will be notified that they must proceed with account re-activation.

• Contacts:

  • New contacts cannot register.

  • Existing contacts can authenticate and access their data from front-end applications.

• Merchant operations:

  • Can perform back-end operations, such as billing existing subscriptions, applying reward evaluation on customer events of existing contacts and perform merchant settlement.

  • Users and external systems can perform any operations, except create new contacts, place new orders activate new reward schemes/reward offers.

  • All of the merchant’s venues inherit this state, and suspension restrictions also apply to them.

Deactivate

The following restrictions apply when a Merchant is deactivated:

• Users:

  • Cannot access the back-end system, when attempting to authenticate, business users should be prompted to proceed with account re-activation.

  • Cannot perform any actions (e.g. create a new contact, create a reward offer).

• Contacts:

  • New contacts cannot register.

  • Existing contacts cannot authenticate or access their data from any front-end applications.

• Merchant operations:

  • Cannot perform any operations - such as billing, reward evaluation, settlement, ordering.

  • For subscriptions - The disconnection process is performed and all subscriptions are set as inactive.

  • System users and external systems cannot perform any operations whatsoever.

  • All Venues inherit the same state, and the same restrictions apply.

Masquerading

To masquerade as another as one of your Merchants, navigate to the Business Network option from the sidebar menu and select the masquerade icon.

Open

To switch back to your business, select your login name (top right-hand corner of the screen) > Switch to ….

Open

Security & Permissions when Masquerading

When a Business user masquerades as a Merchant within its internal network, they are granted, by default, the same permissions as the Merchant owner, typically full access. However, the Business can apply restrictions through User Role settings to control what actions are allowed during masquerading.

To configure these permissions, navigate to Settings > Security > User Roles:

• Allow to masquerade - If enabled, a Business user can masquerade as a Merchant with view access only, i.e. they can’t edit, create or delete records.

• Allow to create/manage data when masquerading - This security setting allows a Business user to edit, create and delete records when masquerading as a Merchant.

Open

Refer to the Security user manual for more security settings.

Creating & Managing the B2B Network

Sending a B2B Invitation

To set up your own B2B Network, the first step is to invite other Businesses to join as your B2B Merchants. Navigate to Business Network > B2B > My B2B Invitations.

Invite Business

The Invite Business option allows to track and invite other the Business registered in the CRM.COM platform.

Open

Once an invitation has been sent, you can monitor its progress through the summary screen.

Open

Possible invitation states are:

• Pending - The invited business has not responded yet.

• Approved - The invited business has accepted the invitation and is now your B2B Merchant.

• Rejected - The invited business does not wish to collaborate.

• Retracted - This state can be set by either your business, or the invited business who no longer wishes to cooperate.

To re-invite a Business, select the ‘Reinstate’ option.

Responding to a B2B Invitation

Through Business Network > B2B > My B2B Invitations you can also view and respond to b2B Invitations sent to your business. Select to either Approve or Reject these invitations.

Open

Being a B2B Merchant

You can view your B2B Peer Businesses (i.e. to whom you are a B2B Merchant) by navigating to Business Network > B2B > My B2B Peers.

Open

Your business decides how to collaborate with a B2B Peer, such as creating offers or sharing selected products.

Masquerading as a B2B Peer

To masquerade as your B2B Peer, select the masquerade icon for the respective B2B Peer from the My B2B Peers screen.

Open

Sharing Products

Choose which products from your own product catalogue to share with B2B Peer(s) for reward offers and product aggregation. This is done by marking the products as Accessible across the B2B Network or Available to specific B2B Peers. For instructions on configuring products for use within a B2B network, please refer to the Product Catalogue manual.

Open

Create Reward Offers

Create reward offers to provide benefits to the contacts of the B2B Peer, focusing on products owned by the B2B Merchant. In this case, the B2B Merchant sets up and funds the offer, even though the purchase takes place at the B2B Peer's location. Refer to the Reward Offers manual for assistance in setting up product-specific offers.

It is important to note that any configurations set up while masquerading as the B2B Peer only apply to that specific B2B Peer. The masquerading Business (B2B Merchant) user is limited to seeing only the relevant configurations for their own Business.

To switch back to your own Business - select your logged-in user name at the top right-hand corner of the screen, and select Switch to… .

What to consider when you are a B2B Peer

If the B2B Peer plans to sell shared products from their B2B Merchants (i.e. operating a marketplace), they need to complete additional setup to ensure a smooth B2B ordering process.

Create an Automation

The B2B Peer business should set up an automation to alert B2B Merchants when an order is placed for their products, so that they may fulfil it.

• Create an Automation with trigger event New Order

  • Filter using Fulfilled by (B2B Merchant)

  • Add an action for Order Provisioning (nearest location or postcode)

  • Add another action to send a Communication to the B2B Merchant User.

Refer to the Automations manual for more information about how to configure automations.

Masquerading as a B2B Merchant

A business user can masquerade as a B2B Merchant to view and manage products which the B2B Merchant has shared with them (not the entire product range of the Merchant business).

To masquerade as one of the Business’s B2B Merchants navigate to Business Network > B2B > My B2B Merchants > click on the masquerade icon of the respective B2B Merchant.

Business Network Settings

To configure your Business Network settings, select Settings from the sidebar menu, then Business Network.

Business Network Model

Determine how your business refers to its internal partners; Merchants and their Venues or Service Providers with their Service Points? The chosen setting will appear throughout the back-end UI.

Open

Organisation Groups

Select +Create Organisation Group and provide a name and description for the group.

Open

To assign an organisation group navigate to Merchants and their Venues, hover next to the Organisation Details section header, and select to edit.

Open

Edit the organisation details

Open

Select and add the organisation group

B2B Spend

Determine whether the business will permit its contacts to spend funds from their Business Pocket to pay for purchases made at other businesses registered on the CRM.COM platform.

Open

Enable B2B spend

Business Settlement

Set up rules on how your business’s settlement will settle the Merchants in your Business Network. Apart from enabling the settlement process, you can also specify:

• Configure the frequency and timing for when the settlement process will occur

• Set up additional Settlement fees when your merchants are debited and or credited.

  • Whether the fee will be applied as an amount or percentage per settlement transaction.

  • The Debit Fee (e.g. due to awards).

  • The Credit Fee (e.g. due to spending).

• Optionally, set up explicit fees for specific Merchants.

Open

Settlement Rules

Set up supplementary rules used during the settlement process, such as:

• Financial Transaction Types: define the types that will be set on the posted financial transactions (payment or payout) as created from the settlement process.

• Amount Allowance: defines the minimum and maximum amount that should be met from the settlement’s financial transaction to settle an organisation account.

Open

Appendix I

Placing an Order through the B2B Network

This example illustrates how a B2B Peer, who operates a marketplace, sells products shared by B2B Merchants. The steps involved are as follows:

1. A business sets up its B2B network and becomes a B2B Peer by inviting other business to join as their B2B Merchants.

2. A customer (Contact) places a single order with the B2B Peer for multiple items from various B2B Merchants.

3. The Contact pays the B2B Peer for all ordered items.

4. Multiple orders are created based on the selected items, i.e. one order per B2B Merchant who is responsible for fulfilling their assigned order.

5. The B2B Merchant is notified of the new order through the configured automation.

6. The B2B Merchant processes the order on behalf of the B2B Peer by masquerading as the B2B Peer.

7. On placing the order at the B2B Peer, an Invoice is issued at the B2B Merchant business that charges the B2B Peer (who also exists as a Company contact in the B2B Merchant).

8. The B2B Merchant sends a Contact Statement to its B2B Peer informing them for all charges. The B2B Peers settles them all, outside CRM.COM.

CRM.COM allows for differentiated product pricing, enabling B2B Peers to earn a commission on each product ordered through their marketplace. For example, instead of paying the full price of £100 to the B2B Merchant, the B2B Peer pays £90, thereby retaining a 10% commission. This is achieved by establishing a second price within the B2B Merchant's system specifically for the B2B Peer, known as Contact pricing. When the invoice is generated, this Contact-specific pricing is applied, and the B2B Peer is charged £90 instead of the full product price.

Purchase & B2B Merchant

Two Business organisations, Audit Co. UK and Coffee London agree to co-operate and set their B2B Terms (e.g. common contact identification means, i.e. phone); therefore, Coffee London is added as a B2B Merchant under Audit Co. UK business network.

• Scenario 1 - A contact registers with both organisations and performs a purchase at Coffee London; the purchase will be created, resulting in possible awards based on applicable offers. A second purchase will also be created (automatically) in Audit Co. UK as well (identifying the contact under Audit Co. UK based on their CRM.COM Wallet), resulting in possible awards from B2B Merchant Coffee London under Audit Co. UK as well.

  • Note - spending can only take place at the organisation where the original purchase was made, not at the B2B Peer organisation to which the purchase is forwarded.

Open

• Scenario 2 - A contact is registered only with one organisation (Audit Co. UK) and performs a purchase at Coffee London (such a purchase will not be created though, since the contact is not found/does not exist in Coffee London). A purchase will (automatically) be created in Audit Co. UK (identifying the contact under Audit Co. UK based on their CRM.COM Wallet code), resulting in possible awards from B2B Merchant Coffee London under Audit Co. UK.

Open

• Scenario 3 - A contact is registered only with the organisation Coffee London, and performs a purchase at Coffee London (resulting in possible awards based on applicable offers). An attempt will be made to create a second purchase (automatically) in Audit Co. UK, however, such a purchase will not be created since the related contact is not found/does not exist in Audit Co. UK (based on the CRM.COM wallet code).

Open

Purchase with B2B Spend & Published Commerce Pools

B2B Spend

An organisation can enable B2B spending (from Business Network settings), allowing its contacts to spend their wallet balance at other businesses.

• Contact Identification - Submitting a purchase event from an organisation (business) that a contact is not registered with can be achieved either using a Spend OTP Token (issued from the organisation that such contact is registered with) OR Contact’s Wallet Identifier & Organisation Identifier (where the organisation identifier should be the one that the contact is registered to).

• Spend Amount - This is always calculated based on, firstly, the available business Open Balance and, secondly, the CRM.COM Wallet balance.

  • In the event that the contact is registered with both organisations, then the system takes into consideration only the business Open Balance from where the contact requested a Spend OTP/provided the Organisation Identifier, and not the Open Balance from both (business) organisations.

B2B Commerce Pools

An organisation can promote a commerce pool to other businesses, and in return, any business can join the promoted commerce pool by adding it to their reward offers ‘Redeem’ settings.

Open

Reference Material

You may also find it helpful to refer to the following manuals for further reading about the Business Network.

CRM.COM Wallet

CRM.COM Wallet

Commerce Pools

Commerce Pools

Security

Security

Communications

Communications

Integrations

Integrations

The Service Owner’s integrations are used if the following integrations are not configured at the Business level.

• Address Registry

  • Google Places

• Communications

  • SMTP

  • SMPP

  • Twilio

  • WhatsApp

  • Firebase

Rewards

Reward Offers

Service Owners

https://crmdevelopment.atlassian.net/wiki/x/EoAFlg

Settlement

https://crmdevelopment.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CRM/pages/2891710466

TABLE OF CONTENTS