Using Channels

Depending on your business, you may have various types of users who need different levels of access. The platform provides many options for managing users rights and abilities by combining user types, roles, and permissions. 

The table below summarizes some of the most common scenarios, and how you can use user licenses and roles to meet these needs.  

Description	Scenario	Company Administrator	Internal Users	User Roles	Channel User	External User	Anonymous User
Internal users only	Acme sells a configurable product. But the quotes their sales team create are inaccurate, and the drawings from engineering have occasional errors. Their first phase is to improve quoting accuracy and automate product design.   All users are employees. Sales, Sales Managers, and Engineers. Employees should see all submitted quotes/configurations.  There's no reason to hide a quote from any team member. What you can do within a quote depends on who you are.   For example, while anyone could submit a configuration, only an Engineer could reject a quote at the "Egineering Approval" stage, and only a Sales Manager can see the "Profit Margin" information in the configuration's bill of materials.
Include distributors (B-to-B-to-C)	Acme's second phase is to include their channel partners: they use a distributor and a reseller to help sell their products.  In addition to the needs above, this phase of the project requires: Channel partners see only their own transactions. Distributor A sees only their own quotes/configurations, not the quotes created by Acme's sales team, nor the quotes from Reseller B.  The same rules apply for reseller B: they only see their own records, not Distributor A or Acme. Channel partners can have different pricing logic. Distributor A enjoys a different pricing agreement, so their configurations should show different prices than Distributor B.
Include direct sales to frequent customers (B-to-C)	As Acme grows, they want to begin selling direct to contacts who are not serviced by their channel partners. Since they do not have an ERP or CRM system to integrate to, they create customers and contacts in Epicor CPQ to allow contacts at those customers to log in and configure products.
Allow B-to-C direct customer sales to anyone on the web	Acme has a new product line that they'd like consumers to configure themselves.  They would like the configurator to be available to the general public, embedded within their own web site, with no complicated enrollment process preventing the person surfing the web from seeing their configurator immediately. The requirements for this phase are: Allow anyone on the internet to see a certain configurator. Only if the web user wants to submit their shopping cart are they prompted for contact information.