[sney]

Hoping someone can provide some insight – here’s our situation.

We run OneWorld with several add-on modules and around 40 users, steadily growing. We are a distributor, and our customers are increasingly requesting more than what we can offer with the Customer Center.

For a Customer Portal we must have the following:

– 100% control over the look, feel, navigation, content and functionality (not just picking a theme and choosing a colour)

– a full ‘My Account’ experience (view transactions, generate statement, edit addresses, run reports, etc)

– a full ‘Shopping’ experience (find items, lots of lists with filters, build a quote/estimate, check stock, etc)

– full access to custom records, lists and fields

We would also like to be able to offer the following:

– integration with a customer’s or vendor’s system

– a customer self-serve pricing feed (they pick the vendors, fields, file format and schedule they want and supply an email address)

What’s not so important is ‘Checkout’ functionality. 95% of what we sell requires consultation, technical configuration, and constructing a BoM, it’s not stuff we would trust our customers to be able to choose and order themselves correctly (that’s our value-add). So customers won’t be picking items and buying them on the spot. This will not be a web store, it will be a Customer Center on steroids. We may offer Checkout functionality in some way in future, perhaps for certain products or for power users…but it’s not our focus.

Here’s my rough list of positives and negatives based on feedback and reading reviews from other users:

Site Builder

+ affordable ($$)

? limited customisation

– won’t be offered long-term

SuiteCommerce Advanced

– very expensive ($$$$$)

+ very customisable

– development intensive

– ‘upgrades’ are a nightmare

3rd Party Web Store + Connector

– still very expensive ($$$$)

+ fairly good customisation on the look and feel

– very limited customisation on unique content

+ much easier to set up

– relying on three different systems talking to each other correctly

Now, there’s a final consideration that I’d like feedback on – SuiteTalk. From what I’ve read, it seems like we could build our own Customer Portal using SuiteTalk to communicate with the NetSuite backend, is this right? I mean, we want a customer to be able to log in through a web browser, view lists and searches, run reports, view/create/edit records, and so on. All of this seems to be supported in SuiteTalk, but I haven’t yet found a definitive answer on this. I guess a proof of concept would be a log-in web page that correctly utilises a saved search in the system (complete with filters and exporting), and can create a few types of records.

I realise development time for the SuiteTalk option (if it is possible) would be higher than all other options above, but on the plus side the monetary cost would be almost nothing and we’d have a 100% custom portal that we could make improvements and changes to as we please.

Really hoping someone can shed light on this

Cheers,

Sam
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[HJMkreminski]

We have built a fully functional Customer Center using suitetalk along with the NetSuite Analytics Connect for quicker access of our data.

[tect22]

Hi,

Building your own Customer Portal through the SuiteTalk technology would really be quite a big task, but with a big reward, specially like you said on the monetary cost and support. With doing your own development for this, you will be able to add additional functionalities base on your specific requirement, and SuiteTalk can just accommodate almost all of the necessary records in NetSuite. You may download the Toolkit Provided in the NetSuite SuiteTalk Page its quite informative, and there’s our usual friendly Help, the SuiteAnswers. . If you need any assistance or just plain inquiry on how SuiteTalk work, you may pm me here.

Regards,

Hector

[chanarbon]

If you are deploying the portal outside of NetSuite let’s say AWS or so, then SuiteTalk is a great option for you to try. Or another consideration is just going to the other web services option which is value REST but would time some time for you to write your custom web services using RESTlets via SuiteScript. But for the scenario that you want to have a fully-integrated customer portal with the NetSuite platform, then why not have a set of Suitelets which the customers could access and the rest is on the client side javascript.

[shanec28c]

Originally posted by chanarbon

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But for the scenario that you want to have a fully-integrated customer portal with the NetSuite platform, then why not have a set of Suitelets which the customers could access and the rest is on the client side javascript.

We took this approach using custom SSP’s with angular.

[Author]

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