I’m pretty sure you would require some custom code hooks but it could be accomplished pretty easily.
Csc has the support for customer groups already so just make a retails and wholesale group then edit a few of your template files to show different views based on customer group. Just read up on code hooks and you should be able to figure it out.
The wholesale group requires the user to login first. Hence, if you want to allow anonymous browsing of your store (retail) then your wholesale customers are going to see the retail pages until they login.
Once they login you can add some hooks to the 'index controller' that will let you adjust to the page you want.
If you know before they get there (like all users coming via link-X will be wholesale customers) then you can have a hook for the index controller that can look for that referrer or simply to provide some parameters to the URL that will enable you to redirect them to a different page.
@tbirnseth: could you suggest a controller hook to use to simply redirect a user to a specific page if they are a member of a wholesale user group after they login?
my_changes/controllers/customer/index.post.php
Add your code to that file to check for what group the user is in and to redirect if appropriate.
This would be for the home page only. If you want to look at all pages you would use
my_changes/controllers/customer/init.post.php
and add the logic to identify the request as well as the user's credentials.
[quote name='Agrias' timestamp='1337096872' post='136470']
would it be possible to just show the same products and options except the wholesale group has a different price? would that involve template editing, or just some kind of specific group price?
[/quote]
In version 3, you simply assign a user to the wholesale group and they're only shown the prices for that group. The prices for each group are then defined at product level.
Personally, I'd like the option to have a global discount but I guess that's what promotions are for.
For me, the easiest way to set this up was a promotion that discounted the standard price in the catalog by a percentage if the user was in the wholesale group.
That way, they come to the site, sign up as a wholesale user and then they see the original retail price and their wholesale price. This way you can have multiple wholesale groups with different price breaks.
Hope this helps