Customers

If the user is a customer, the user can be either registered or non-registered.

Registered customer

A registered customer has a registration type of R to indicate that the user plays the Registered Customer role within WebSphere Commerce. A registered customer has a unique identifier or logon ID, a password, and is required to provide some profile data for registration purposes. Approval may also be required for user registration, and a registered user can be in pending approval, approved, or rejected state. By default, a rejected user needs to be registered again, and a pending approval user is not authorized to log onto the system. Registered customers can be classified according to their profile type; that is, profile type B denotes a business user (or a business direct or indirect customer) and profile type of C denotes a retail user (or a consumer direct customer). IBM recommends that business users belong to their appropriate organizational entity in the membership hierarchy instead of the Default Organization. This means that, when a business user registers the organizational entity that the user belongs to should be specified, otherwise WebSphere Commerce will default to using the Default Organization. WebSphere Commerce commands can create a registered user, and update profile information. By default, if you have been assigned the Site Administrator, Buyer Administrator, or Seller Administrator role, you can register an organizational entity and update its profile data.

Non-registered customer

A non-registered customer, or guest customer, has the registration type of G to indicate that the user does not play a role within WebSphere Commerce. A guest customer only has limited privileges within the site, does not possess a unique identifier, logon ID, or password, and does not have to provide profile data. It is also possible that the design of the site requires a guest customer to become a registered customer before certain tasks can be performed. For example, a guest customer at a store may be able to browse the catalog, but must register before the user can place an order with the store. Moreover, a user may initially perform actions as a guest customer, and as a result, certain resources are associated with the user. Subsequently, if the user registers or logs on as a business user, resources that are associated with the user when the user was a guest are by default transferred to the new identity as a business user. If those resources contradict what the user should do in the capacity of a business user, the site needs to be implemented such that any contradiction will be detected later on by other business processes. For example, a user may visit a site as a guest and place certain items into their shopping cart. Subsequently, the user may log on or register as a business user. The items added to the shopping cart while the user was a guest still belong to the user. If those items violate any business policy of his organization or those items are actually personal items that the user pays for personally, it is the responsibility of subsequent business processes to detect the situation and take appropriate actions (for instance, an order approval process may be in place to ensure all the items a business user purchase are for business use).

Related concepts

• Customer information

• Users

• Member groups

• Registered customer groups

Related tasks

• Change a customer's information

• Registering a customer to a store

• Create a user

• Listing users

• Create a member group

• Change a member group