Customer Account Management

[robmackley]

Hi,

My customer www.laukgroup.com has a very large Actinic website (over 2500 products). I fully maintain the site and make design changes on a weekly basis. The only involvement they have is downloading orders from the website using Actinic Business Client. This means that there is no need for them to have the latest snapshot of their site on their PC.

I've set them up a customer group and account which works fine. However, they now want to maintain customer accounts themselves (add delivery addresses and change passwords etc). To do this I will have to save a snapshot which takes nearly an hour. I'll then email them a 40mb file which they then have to import. They then do the changes to the account settings and then upload the file (which takes nearly an hour again for all the pages to be reviewed). They them have to perform a snapshot (another hour) and send me the updated file back so I can carry on working on the site. This obviously isn't an acceptable solution.

I'm looking for some guidance on a work-around please. I could store account details online using mysql but wouldn't know where to start in getting this info into Actinic for when customers login. My other thought is probably more workable - Is there a way of configuring my customers 'update' button to just upload account details? Or is there a file that stores the account info that I can get them to upload via ftp to the site if they do a local 'Generate website first'?

Any ideas or guidance or even just a simple "no chance" much appreciated.

Thanks in advance, Rob.

[stonda]

Hi. Big and important (for me !) question. See Fergus and Gabriel on this forum for the work they are doing actually on a similar problem.
See also Bill Campbell which is working on creating a customer account on line for my website : the idea would be to allow customer to add a password on 1 of the 3 questions at the end of the checkout, so we can create a customer account with the email address as login and this password.
I am sure that this point will be 1 of the more important for client in the future, and it would probably be interesting to create a specific add on for this.
Please send me information for this job, I will be interested.

[gabrielcrowe]

you'll find a plugin that sends customer data online on my website, listed below.

v8 only, at the moment.

[robmackley]

Hi Gabriel. Had a quick look. Sounds brilliant!!! So what happens if I upload their site again and my customer has change customer account details - will my upload write over anything they have done?

[gabrielcrowe]

the details sent to the server are one way only.

the customer would not be able to change them.

[robmackley]

Sorry Gabriel, I'm slightly lost now. Here's the scenorio. I set up a customer account in Actinic and set a password to 'bob' and then upload the site. Then, using your Actinet software or plugin will my client be able to change that password to 'tim' online without needing to use Actinic? If so, when I next update the site (I've still got the password set to 'bob' on my version of the site) will it change the password back from 'tim' to 'bob'?

[gabrielcrowe]

no, thats not what actinet does.

i dont use the 'customer' system in actinic. its not very much use.

efforts are underway, to make a real customer login system. this ia related thing, so, sorry if this is not for you.

[robmackley]

Ah right, thanks anyway. Actinet might be good for another of my customers though who wants to be able to change product prices remotely!!!

Back to customer accounts. Has anyone else got any ideas to my first post???

[stonda]

See also Bill Campbell which is working on creating a customer account on line for my website : the idea would be to allow customer to add a password on 1 of the 3 questions at the end of the checkout, so we can create a customer account with the email address as login and this password.

I think that it is actually the only way of research similar to what you're looking for. We've made some tests and it still needs some "adjustments". But I thought that we can nearly have a correct system, with perhaps the possibility to link it to the Gabriel's Actinet ?
If Bill see this post, perhaps he can explain you better than me.

[TraceyG]

Hi,

Once your customer has set up the accounts they could export the customer accounts only (File | Export | Customer Accounts) and email the file to you to import and then update the site.

[robmackley]

Hi Tracey, thanks for this.

This is they way I've been doing things and it works ok for now.