Magento

I would love to see a feature where items are hidden at the onset to the general public. Once a customer creates a login those items may become visible but only to them.

for example, 1 product is universal, and can be sold as is.
a custom version is available at a higher cost, once a customer creates an account and customizes the product, it remains visible only to them.
customer A logs in, buys the basic item (Version A)
Customer B logs in, buys his custom version (Version B)
Customer C logins in, buys his own version (Version C)

Customer A logs back in, cannot see B or C.
B logins in and can see A as it is the basic version and B as it is their custom product. but not C
C logins in, can also see A, can see C, but cannot see B.

Please respond with any suggestions, or comments.

Perhaps this could be done by having groups of customers and sub groups? then limiting a product via the new product set up wizard to only display a product to a certain group?

to use the default settings, a t-shirt could be set up as a product, but is customized to a general customer, and a custom version for a wholesale customer, and as such by limiting a product to a group, it would restrict the product’s visibility.

another use would be if you ran a Distribution Center for 5 companies, each with 5 locations, you could in fact have 25 user accounts, 5 groups each with 5 locations, 5 like products, but have the label vary between them based on the group. if each of the 5 customers were competitors, for example a hotel cleaning supply company, they would want their own specific name on the label, and not broadcast to their competitors who buy the same product with a different label that they too are a customer of your store.

In thinking about it further,
technically i guess it wouldn’t matter, since an automation system isn’t in the backend that takes the account, the orders and then fills them without human interaction. it’d be rather simple to look at the orders screen, see the product ordered, match it to the account that placed the order, and when physically pulling the product before shipment, grabbing that client’s product over their competitor.

since there is human interaction it now seems to me that it would only really make it so that the admin could skip 1 second of thought when filling the order.