Customers may be placed within a hierarchical structure where a customer can be assigned a parent and children. This is useful functionality for a group of corporate buyers that may want to share information such as orders and that may have roles so that a parent in the hierarchy needs to approve the orders of a child. The hierarchy can be constructed using the Admin App in the Hierarchy tab of the Edit Customer panel. The functionality within this tab allows you to assign children to the customer currently being edited.

Using the Admin Engine, in the getCustomerForIdWithOptions() and getCustomerForEmailWithOptions() API calls, you may specify in the AdminGetCustomerOptions object whether to populate the AdminCustomer with its parent, its direct children or all of its child tree.

Using the Application Engine, there is a getCustomerWithOptions() API call which allows you to specify in the FetchCustomerOptions object whether to populate the returned Customer with its parent, its direct children or all of its child tree. Also when searching for the orders of a customer you can specify through the OrderSearch object whether to include the orders of parent, sibling or child customers. This functionality allows B2B buyers to view orders of their colleagues as well as their own. Similar functionality exists for the getOrdersPerCustomerWithOptions() and getOrderWithOptions() API calls using the FetchOrderOptions object.