I have been working on it for a few days now. I'm trying to avoid any semblance of having to manually set lists of things, and use the information that's already there to form the segments dynamically. However, all my attempts so far result in 0 items being displayed for all customers.
My only item segment is a dynamic Item Collection whose saved search includes all Item records.
My only customer segment is more complicated:
• There is a Custom record type "Brand Owner" with two List/Record:Customer fields, "Brand" and "Distributor". The Brand field has Record is Parent = Yes.
• The Customer record pointed to by Brand Owner: Brand can see the Brand Owner: Distributor via joins, and they show up in a sublist labeled "Distributors", and can be joined to in saved search results and filters. However, The Customer record pointed to by Brand Owner: Distributor cannot see the Brand Owner record. This is a problem because the Distributor customer records are the ones that will be logging in to the Web Store.
• I created a field to point back to the Brand Owner record so that my Customer Segment's Customer Group's saved search can see the Brand Owner, and therefore the Brand Owner: Brand customer record. This works.
• A Personalized Catalog View with All Items and the Customer Segment described above, set to "Display Fully", seems to do nothing, despite a LOT of items showing up in the Items By Customer workbook. If they show up in the Workbook even when I have filtered it by both the Customer Segment and the Customer matching the Distibutor customer I'm logging in with, shouldn't I see all those Items in the Webstore as that distributor Customer?
• I realize that most of our items are not set to Display in Web Site, so I turned that on for one of the items, but it still doesn't show up. I can't get this running in a timely manner if I have to rebuild the search index every time I tweak something to see if it works by trial and error.
• My "All Items" saved search for my "All Items" dynamic Item Collection has been set to Public. The Item Collection itself doesn't seem to have any visibility settings other than in the Customer Segment Manager.