Retailer Groups allow you to assign your customers to groups that reflect the tiers that your organization is working with. With help of these groups, you can grant exclusive access to entities like articles across our solutions, marketing files and stock allocation.
To learn more about the different contexts that can be managed and how to set things up, please have a look at our article about Exclusivity Management. Retailer groups are a prerequisite to manage:
In the following guide, you will learn how to
create Retailer Groups
assign retailers to Retailer Groups manually
assign retailers to Retailer Groups via an import
Please note: You can only enter the Retailer Groups space as an Admin, Brand manager, Content manager and Rights Manager.
Create a Retailer Group
First, go to Retailers in the main menu and select Retailer Groups from the sub menu. Click on the Create Group button on the right side.
Now, choose the brand which you would like to create the Retailer Group for. Enter a Group Name, Group Code and optionally add a description.
Pro Tip: If your organization works with tiers and has internal keys or codes for those tiers, it can help to use the same naming conventions for the group names and codes.
Assign Retailers to Group manually
Select the group which you would like to add retailers to in the group overview.
Click on Manage in the Retailers section.
Now, type in your retailer and select it from the drop down menu. Finally, click Save. The customer has now been added to the group. Repeat this process to add more retailers.
Import Retailers into Retailer Groups
In order to make the retailer assignment process to groups as efficient as possible, our platform offers a self-service feature that allows brands to import retailer groups via a CSV file, streamlining the process and enhancing scalability.
Prerequisites and Limitations
Before diving into the import process, it's essential to understand the prerequisites and limitations:
Retailer groups must be created beforehand
The import process only supports assigning retailers to additional groups; removals of retailers from groups must be done manually.
For the import you need to upload a CSV that at least contains columns with the following header: brand_id, retailer_id, group_codes. They can be downloaded in your Retailer Overview
Brand and retailer IDs are both referring to identifiers that are assigned via Fashion Cloud - you can export them via a the retailer overview dashboard on the platform
Group Codes can be set in the Group creation process individually based on what makes sense for your organization. Please note that group codes are case sensitive.
You are able to import retailers to multiple groups and brands from your organization in one go. For each retailer-brand combination that you want to assign groups to, there needs to be one row in the sheet.
Step-by-Step Guide
Follow these steps to import retailer groups efficiently:
1. Preparation of Retailer Group Import Data
Export via Retailer Overview: Export the list of connected retailers as a CSV from the Retailer Overview dashboard.
Adding Group Codes: Modify the CSV by adding group codes to the corresponding entries. Ensure the correct formatting without altering retailer and brand IDs.
Please note that group codes are case sensitive. Make sure that they are exactly spelled as in your retailer group overview.
Pro Tip: You can add multiple group codes in one cell if you want to assign a retailer to multiple groups from the same brand. In that case you need to separate the group codes with a semicolon (":").
2. Group Import Modal 1
Click the Import Groups button.
Upload the prepared CSV file.
3. Group Import Modal 2
Upon successful validation, the CSV content will be processed.
In the import summary, there are up to 3 status infos that can be listed:
X entries were successfully assigned - whenever a retailer got assigned to new groups via the import this will be listed here
X entries were already assigned - when a retailer has already been assigned to a group listed in the import sheet before the import this will be listed here
X entries failed to be assigned - whenever some of the mandatory IDs couldn’t be matched this will be listed here on retailer level
In case of the alert “X entries failed to be assigned” there will be a downloadable error report that points out which rows couldn’t be matched. 5 The error report is a copy of the import sheet with 5 additional columns:
brand_id_unmatched → whenever brand IDs were incorrect this will be highlighted in this column-row-combination
retailer_id_unmatched → whenever retailer IDs were incorrect this will be highlighted in this column-row-combination
group_code_unmatched → whenever group codes were incorrect or not existent this will be highlighted in this column-row-combination
groups_newly_assigned → all groups that were newly assigned via this import are listed here
groups_already_assigned → all groups that were listed in the import but were already assigned before this import are listed here
With help of this report you can correct any IDs that couldn’t be matched and retry the import.