Product Access Control (PAC) is an optional account feature which can control which products an account user can purchase online. It’s usually used in conjunction with the spend control functionality and is unavailable to non-account or anonymous customers.
Generally, PAC determines which products a customer can view or purchase online and can be implemented in a hard or soft version. With the hard implementation, users can view only those products which they have been allowed to see. Meanwhile, the soft version consists of three levels of product visibility:
- P - purchasable (core)
- A - approval required (non-core)
- C - cannot purchase (excluded)
If a user orders a product that requires approval, and the spend control function is also enabled, a requisition is created which must be approved by a user with administrator rights. Each product can only fall into one of the above statuses at a time, and an administrator with the relevant permissions can control which status each product belongs to.
PAC lists can be applied uniformly across your whole organisation or differently at different levels. This is managed through the Product Access Control section from the My Account page.