In its current form (version 4.0) the shopping cart does not totally meet the needs of a wholesale or B2B customer. The customer groups was a great first step however it needs to be taken a bit further.

In order to really ramp up wholesale functionality it would be great if you could implement the following:

Make customer registration a process where the customer needs to be approved before being able to sign in.

Make the entire store purely a catalogue with no ability to view pricing, order products etc unless the customer has signed in. It would be handy if these functions were configurable via the admin and very depending on the customer group.

The customer groups already handle discount pricing pretty well, however it would be nice to also implement this at the product level.

A lot of wholesalers will need to be able to offer credit to their customers as well as the ability to give them a purchase order number.

Another important function would be the ability to order multiples of the one product for the different variations e.g. 3 small blue T-shirts, 5 small red T-shirts, 10 medium red T-shirts etc

That's about all that I can think of at the moment hopefully others will see this as something necessary, vote for it and and anything that I have left out.

With the coming ability to assign per item shipping status, it seems the best time to include this functionality.

For preorders, it would be good if when a product is setup, that an option could be clicked that it is 'preorder'. The shipment status is automatically set and the person is not charged for it. When the product becomes available, the preorder statuses could be sorted and then charged.

For backorders, and If a store tracks inventory, then when the item hits zero, backorder is automatically displayed on the product page and the person is not charged for it (and that item is set as backorder in it's item shipping status). If inventory is not tracked, the store manager would have to choose and option stating it's on backorder.

What do you all think?

The super affiliate module allows you to create super affiliate stores for your affiliates. A super affiliate store is an InstanteStore that mirrors your store's (designated as the "master" store) categories and products. The categories and products of your super affiliate stores will be the same ones that are currently in your store, with your prices and settings. Super affiliates will not be able to create new products of their own at their stores. Customers who register at your super affiliate stores will "belong" to your store and not the super affiliate stores, and orders at the super affiliate stores will be sent to you, not your super affiliate. Your super affiliate will have a reduced set of administrative functions, basically that allows them to configure the look and feel of the store (e.g. by changing the template, and adding marketing materials as custom pages, etc.). Super affiliates will also have access to the affiliate statistics. The responsibility of managing the super affiliate store customers and orders will be handled by the master store merchant. Generally, the point of the super affiliate module is to allow you to have another avenue for marketing your products.

Your super affiliate stores will be able to point their own domains, which can be independent of your store. e.g. if your store is http://www.mystore.com, your super affiliate store can be, for example, http://www.superaff.com or something else. Your super affiliate will also be assigned a catch-all domain email address after pointing his/her domain to receive emails directed to his/her store. You, as the master store, will be assigned 5 fixed email addresses in order to handle customer inquiries or order-related correspondence.

Super affiliates will apply for the super affiliate module in a similar fashion to regular affiliates once you've configured the super affiliate module. Instead of applying to be regular affiliates, they will apply to be super affiliates. Once you've approved their applications, you can then proceed to create super affiliate stores for each of your super affiliates. They will be sent the relevant admin information via email once their stores are created.

After activating super affiliate module, when the customer applies to become an affiliate, they will have the option to become a super affiliate. After approval, the affiliate needs to purchase a "super affiliate store" (product) from your store. You will need to track the payment before creating super affiliate store for the affiliate. You can set the name and price for your "super affiliate store" (product). You would need to publish your store after the configuration
You can temporary suspend the super affiliate store and unsuspend it later. The monthly fee charges will still apply to Suspended stores. If one of your super affiliate stores is not doing well, you can cancel the super affiliate store. Cancelled stores will be auto deleted from the system.

When editing template designs in Design Mode, you should be able to right click on the screen and select "Add Panel" from the existing menu. This would show a list of panels that may be added to the current layout.

it is very easy to move or delete existing panels but problematic to add new ones. eg: I remove the Newsletter sign up box, but then decide that I'd like to add it back.

Currently this can only be done by hard coding the HTML or CSS files. If users are given the ability to Delete a Panel
in Design Mode then it's only logical to also allow then to add panels.