Displaying Only Certain Products to Certain Groups

[wastubbs]

For the last few days I've been setting up Joomla! 2.5.11 & VirtueMart 2.0.20b with products and users. Let me start off by saying that I could be looking at the wrong functions in VirtueMart, and there's a better way to handle it - I'm definitely open to suggestions. Here's the scenario I'm working with;

100 products, 3 companies, 1-3 users per company. Each one will be given access to a curated list of consumable products that they commonly order, based on their equipment. For example, Company A, Bob does all the ordering. He has 3 printers, and each one takes a specific toner and style of label. Company B, Sue & Carl only have 1 printer, it's the same as one of Bob's. John over at Company C has 2 printers, one like Sue & Carl's, and another one with a specific ribbon.

All 3 companies have their own catalogs, then, and we don't want to show them things they won't need to prevent mistakes and make things easier.

I've done research on this topic, and all mentions that I've found of how to do this have been referencing older versions, or were incomplete. If the posts scattered across various forums are any indication, this is a common requirement for e-commerce with no clear "how-to" or best practices.

Currently, I've assigned all 4 VirtueMart shoppers to a shopper group named after their own company, and I've supplied a small test batch of products with the shopper_group_name included. I'm using CSVI to upload the products, and separate multiple shopper_group_names with pipes inside quotes.

Code Select Expand

product_sku,product_description, <snip> ,shopper_group_name
G0000001000,Toner for HP 5100DS, <snip> ,"Alpha"
G0000002000,Toner for HP 1350ZN, <snip> ,"Alpha|Bravo"
G0000003000,Toner for HP 4200sp, <snip> ,"Charlie|Bravo"

Any advice is greatly appreciated. I will also gladly evangelize on the prescribed solution once I've got it to work, and try to pay it forward.