Customer accounts passwords

[Polvo]

Is there a way for customers to set-up (or even change) their own passwords in Business? The way it seems to work is:

• we convert an order to an account
• we create a password for the user
• manually email the password to customer

I hope I've miss-understood the process as it seems clunky and insecure.
Is anyone successfully using accounts in Business?

[Singletrack]

We use accounts in our shop. We've currently got over 10,000 accounts set up.

We are a magazine and we set all our subscribers up with an account by cludging our subscribers database into a csv file that we can import directly into Business. We then have a login page that explains how they use their subscription details to login (password is their unique subscriber number).

Another irritation is the restriction that usernames have to be unique. We use surnames to generate the username and with 10,000+ accounts there's going to be lots of duplication. Our workaround is to add the first three characters of their postcode to the end of their surname to generate a unique username. Surely if the password is unique it doesn't matter what the username is? I know it's more secure this way but is it unneccessarily so?

But, beyond all that irrelevence, the fact that users can't change their passwords themselves and we have to do all the maintenance manually when customers email us to say they need to change their email address or have forgotten their password is a major faff and waste of our time. When you have over 10k accounts it gets quite busy answering these kinds of customer queries.

So I'd like to add my voice to the above...

Any plans for user side account maintenance in the future?

[cdicken]

Hi Paul & Mark

We are currently looking into the area of customer accounts, and looking at potential solutions to this very issue. So hopefully we will see it dealt with in a future release.

[nacotton]

A further voice...

Just to add my voice to the above... user-side account maintenance would be a massive boon for us, too. We're in a similar situation - about to mail out several thousand letters to offline customers imposing a made-up (and therefore not too memorable) password.

[andrew b]

Any news on when the customer accounts function may be available. In this day and age actinic is serious lagging behind if it cant handle this!

[Jan]

We use customer accounts in our integrated labels shop, and also found it hard work to add new customers manually, so we have just added a customer accounts generation to our One Stop Order Processing plugin, this program generates an account import file based on orders and also emails people to tell them about their account, we have also added an account management' product to the store and so now people can login and change their details online as well and there new details are automatically updated after being downloaded. It works well. You can find more details and a free trial at this URL :

http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/Mul...r-Actinic.html

Regards,