ECT was designed as a B2C cart. We use it as a B2B cart.

With some minor tweaking, I believe the cart can provide basic CRM functionality without having to load up a separate database (e.g., Salesforce).
I already tweaked the cart to show company names in Extra1 and ShipExtra1 fields. (B2B)

CLIENT LOGIN ADMINISTRATION
I have recently started using the ClientLogin table and features for companies with multiple locations (without login). Doing so makes it easier to aggregate sales and manage accounts (B2B CRM).
Customers don’t login to purchase, they send us digital purchase orders we enter manually.
Any company can have multiple locations and multiple orders at each location, sometimes paid from a central location and in other cases paid from each physical location or some hybrid of both. So, from a database design standpoint, we have
• One company to many locations (one high-level client ID to multiple lower level client IDs)
• One location to many orders (Currently, I can only do this level of CRM)

To use ECT as a CRM, not just a cart, I need to be able to:
• see and edit the ClientID on Client Login Administration pages
• Sort account orders in descending order (most recent first)
• Address management may be useful (for locations), but haven’t explored it yet.

ORDERS ADMINISTRATION
• see and edit the ClientID in Orders Admin as well
• show the company name and ship company name on orders (before names)
• It would be great if the cart, while processing an order, could look up the most likely ClientID (as Client Login now finds orders to link) and populate the order automatically without manual intervention.

I think this expand the market for ECT and it's usefulness to existing B2B customers like me.


Jay Arthur, The KnowWare Man, works with companies that want to solve problems of delay, defects and deviation.