What's the difference between person customer,consumer customer, and..

[Former Member]

Hi...

I'm in need of urgent help. I'm trying to implement the BAPI: BAPI_CUSTOMER_CREATEFROMDATA1.

In the documentation, they talk about 3 types of customer:

Non-consumers

Consumer customers

Company customers

What do these mean? And what's the difference between each of these?

I'm new to the concepts of customer master, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Former Member]

Hi ,

maybe you missed the first line of the documentation which states :

Only for Online Store !!

In other words, you should first avoid to use that function module.

The name of it is attracting, but you still should not use it.

It is not intended to be used out of its original process context. One fo the main effect you will face is limitations and data inconsistencies.

For the maintenance of customers, there is NO BAPI and NO direct function module.

There are some functions modules like the one above where the name is looking nice. But these should not be used.

• Below ECC 2005 (6.00), the only solution was batch input and DEBMAS idocs. See [note 384462|https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/384462]

• Starting with ECC 2005 (6.00) and above: a synchronisation tool has been introduced. See class CMD_EI_API and VMD_EI_API

Now some few words about comsumers, customers.

The difference between a company customer and a non-consumer, I can't state. For me, this is the same.

Now the consumer. This is a very specific master data.

A consumer is mainly a person.

As a result, the best definition would be :

'A consumer is a customer that has one and only one contact person which is himself'

The construction of the address is pretty different. All the address data is at contact person level.

The KNA1 table does not own any address fields. All is at KNVK level.

For the BAS (Business address services) tables, this is the same. ADRC is mostly empty. Only ADRP, ADCP... contains meaningfull data.

Best regards

Alain

Hope this helps

BR

Alain