Member site or password protection?

[cmotor]

I have a client who wants an ecomerce site with Pay Pal shopping cart. They want a site for retail consumers but they want wholesale clients to be able to login as a user and have wholesale information visible to them that would be invisible to retail visitors. Will this require alot of complex coding? I know html, css and can do some minor editing of java scripts. It seems to me that the best option would be to create a wholesale section and password protect it from retail customers, instead of creating a database of wholesale accounts with special content. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
C

[willybfriendly]

There are any number of E-Commerce packages that offer separate pricing per customer group.

You don't say what package you are using, or considering, or if you are coding from scratch. If from scratch, then you would not need an overly complex chagne to the database. Basically you will need to add tables for customer groups and customer group pricing, and add a column to the customer data to reflect what group they are in.