FAQ

How is this different from Commerce's catalog pricing rules?

Catalog pricing rules price by condition — this product type, that user group, over that quantity. They are excellent at that.

What they cannot express is the thing wholesale runs on: a negotiated sheet of prices belonging to one named customer, with quantity breaks, that somebody imported from a spreadsheet and will export back to one. A price list in Forklift is a document with a name, an owner and a body of rows, not a rule.

The two coexist. Commerce's rules produce the list price; Forklift's lists price the contract on top of it, and Forklift will let a public promotion win when it is cheaper.

And Commerce Bulk Pricing?

Bulk Pricing does quantity breaks. Forklift does quantity breaks inside customer-specific price lists, which is a different problem — and the rest of the suite besides.

Does it work with an existing Commerce store?

Yes. Forklift never writes to Commerce's tables. Retail orders are untouched: an order with no company on it picks up no B2B rules at all, which matters because most stores that install this do it for one customer in twelve.

Can somebody buy for more than one company?

Yes, and their role can differ per account — administrator of one, viewer on another. That is what happens when a buying group and one of its members both trade with you.

When somebody belongs to several accounts and none is marked as their default, Forklift will not guess. Pricing a basket at the wrong account's rates is worse than asking which account it is for, so the portal asks.

What happens to an order when the account goes on hold?

Nothing. On hold stops new orders. Existing orders, quotes, invoices and the statement are untouched, and taking it off hold is one click. That is deliberately different from "closed", which says the same thing to Forklift and a different thing to the person reading the account.

Do approvers need a login?

No. The approval email carries a single-purpose tokenised link, and they decide from their inbox. The people who sign off spend in a purchasing department very often have no account on your site, and a workflow that requires one is a workflow that gets bypassed by forwarding the email to somebody who does.

Can somebody approve their own order?

Yes, if they hold an approving role. In a two-person business the administrator is the only approver there is, and forbidding it would make the account unusable. What stops it being meaningless is that the decision is recorded with a name and a timestamp against it.

What if the basket changes after it has been approved?

An approval records the amount it covered. A basket that has grown past it needs approving again; one that has shrunk does not. Nobody needs re-authorising to spend less.

Does paying on terms mark the order as paid?

No, and that is the point. The purchase-order gateway authorises rather than purchases, so the order completes, the customer gets their confirmation, the goods are picked, and totalPaid stays at zero — which is true, because nobody has paid. Capture the transaction when the money arrives and Commerce marks it paid with its own machinery.

Every report, paid-status filter and integration in your store already understands that. A bespoke "invoice" state would have to be taught to all of them.

What happens when a customer goes over their credit limit?

The purchase-order gateway withdraws itself. Checkout does not stop. A customer over their limit holding out a credit card should be allowed to use it, and refusing them is a way to lose money rather than to protect it.

Where does the balance come from?

SUM over the ledger, every time. There is no running total on the company row, because a cached balance is a number that can be wrong — and the moment it goes wrong, a refund landing from a webhook while somebody edits the same order, is exactly the moment somebody is on the telephone about it.

Can I get a PDF statement?

Forklift gives you a printable HTML statement and a CSV. Commerce already ships a PDF pipeline of its own, and pointing that at a statement is a better answer than Forklift growing a second one with its own template quirks and its own security advisories to track.

Will an exemption certificate zero-rate everything?

Only if you tell it to. Tax is removed for a certificate that is approved by a human, unexpired, and covers the delivery address. A certificate with no country covers everywhere; a country with no state covers that country; a country and a state must match both.

A Texas resale certificate does not exempt a delivery to Ohio, and letting it would be Forklift creating a tax liability on your behalf.

Does it work with Avalara or TaxJar?

Forklift replaces the tax engine only when Commerce's own is in place. A store running Avalara or TaxJar keeps theirs — those services do their own exemption handling, and quietly replacing them would be both wrong and very hard to diagnose. Certificates are still recorded; they just are not applied, and the log says so.

What happens when my licence lapses?

Nothing breaks. Pro configuration is ignored, not obeyed:

• Price lists stop applying, so buyers pay list price. That errs towards not under-charging.
• The purchase-order gateway withdraws, so no new credit can be opened. Existing invoices are untouched.
• Approvals stop blocking checkout. A store that cannot check out at all is worse than one that lets an order through, so the order is placed and flagged. This is the one place Forklift fails open, and it says so on the order, in the approvals screen and in forklift/maintenance/doctor rather than hiding it.

Can I import ten thousand prices?

Yes. Use the console:

php craft forklift/price-lists/import prices.csv --list=acme

Writes are batched and chunked, and run in a transaction. An import replaces the list — the spreadsheet is the contract.

Does the quick-order pad guess at SKUs?

Exact match, then case-insensitive, and nothing else. A buyer typing a part number wants that part, and quietly supplying the nearest thing to it is how the wrong item ends up on a pallet. Prefix matching belongs in the autocomplete, where a human picks from the results.

Does reordering copy the old prices?

No — it re-prices at today's rates and tells the buyer which lines changed. A contract that has been renegotiated, a break that has moved, or a list-price rise would otherwise be quietly ignored, and the buyer would meet the real number at checkout.

Can I style the portal?

Create _forklift/portal/<name>.twig in your own templates and it wins outright. Forklift ships plain fallbacks so the portal works the moment you install it, and so you can see what the variables are before writing your own.

Something is not working and there is no error anywhere.

php craft forklift/maintenance/doctor

That is exactly what it is for.