B2B using Customer Groups as Company Account or creating another table for Company Accounts

Question

We are building a Magento site for a B2B application. At first our developer used Customer Groups to function as Company Accounts, so that Customers (contacts) could be linked to each of them. However, we are at 600 Customer Groups and over 55,000 products and reindexing will not complete.

Our web host tells us we are not using Magento how it should be used. They recommend we reduce the number of Customer Groups (to 2-3) to resolve the reindexing problem. However if we do this, we still need to account for Company Accounts somewhere in the database. So my developer says they can create another table for Company Accounts which will have to be manually linked to pricing etc. However, I'm unsure if this is going to solve the reindexing problem.

How can we be sure before going to the additional trouble/expense that it will work?

Answer 1

We only casually monitor these as the forum is technical and only a small percent of business effort is related to technology, we read it was 3-6%. We have found you can do almost everything without coding, so without knowing the business requirements it would be hard to advise. It seems like you want customer specific pricing, reduced customer groups would help with performance but we found that is only a small part of the solution.

Normally use LinkedIn for these types of business questions - always seemed more appropriate.