Creating and managing trade customers

When a visitor to your website wants to create a trade customer account, they must apply for one. All ShopWired themes support a trade customer account application page available at account/trade-application.

The appearance of your website's trade account application page is determined by your website's theme. Some of the fields available on the form can be customised using the theme editor.

You can also use the custom fields app to add additional fields to the form.

For assistance in customising your website's trade account application page, contact theme support.

When a visitor applies for a trade customer account on your website, you will be sent the Trade account application email. You can then choose to either activate the account, ignore the application, or delete it.

1. Navigate to B2B
2. Locate the trade customer account in the table
   • Select edit to view the details of the trade customer account
   • Select the active setting to accept the application

When you accept a trade customer account application, the customer will be sent the Trade account activated email.

You can configure the contents of both emails from the Email settings page.

Read here for additional guidance on customising the contents of these emails.

If you don't want to manually approve trade customer account applications and automatically activate accounts:

1. Navigate to B2B > Trade settings
2. Select the Automatically activate trade customer account applications setting

On ShopWired, a trade customer record is created:

• When a visitor to your website applies for a trade customer account
• When you create a trade customer account through your ShopWired account

Trade customer records are identified by email address:

• Two trade customer records cannot share the same email address
• Orders are assigned to trade customer records using the order's billing email address

When the same trade customer places two orders with different email addresses but with all the same other details, the orders will be assigned to two different trade customer records.

If a customer already has a standard customer record, you can convert it to a trade customer account:

1. Navigate to Customers
2. Locate the customer record in the table
3. Select edit
4. Select convert to trade account

When a standard customer record is converted to a trade account:

• Any orders assigned to the standard customer record will be assigned to the trade account
• The account holder is not sent an email

Each trade customer is available for you to manage within your ShopWired account.

To view and manage trade customers, navigate to B2B.

• Use the search to search trade customers by name, email address, or postcode
• Use the number of orders option to filter the displayed trade customers by the number of orders placed
• Use the all, active and inactive options to filter by trade account state

To edit a trade customer, you can select the edit option and edit any details about the trade customer, including adding custom field data.

If you delete a trade customer, any orders they've placed will not be affected.

You can use the download option to download the information stored on your ShopWired account about the trade customer. This option can be used for responding to GDPR requests.

Use the active setting for each trade customer account to set the account as either active or inactive.

Each time a trade customer account is designated as active, the account holder will be sent the Trade account activated email.

To create a trade customer account through your ShopWired account:

1. Navigate to B2B > Create Customer
2. Add all of the details for the trade customer
   • The First name, Last name, Company name, Email address and Password settings are required
   • Selecting the accepts marketing option will mark the trade customer record as accepting marketing communications and also add the trade customer record to the newsletter subscribers list
3. Use the Notes setting to record any internal notes about the trade customer; these will not be displayed to your trade customer
4. You can use the custom fields app to configure additional data for the trade customer

When you create a trade customer account, the trade customer will be sent the Trade account created email.

Trade customers can also be created in bulk using the trade customer import/export system.

You can use the 5 Additional data fields in the Trade customer additional data section to add notes or information about the trade account. This information is only displayed on your website (to trade customers logged in) if you have configured your website to do so (the information is not displayed by default on themes).

Additional addresses can be configured on trade customer accounts for them to select from on your website's checkout:

• Use the Create an additional address section to add a new address
• You can only create additional addresses on existing trade customer accounts (when creating a new trade customer account you can only add a single address)
• Additional addresses are displayed in the Additional addresses section where they can be managed (either edited or deleted)
• Each additional address is displayed in a separate tab labelled Address 1, Address 2 etc.

The orders assigned to the trade customer are displayed in the Order history section. Only orders assigned to the trade customer when the order was created are displayed.

When creating or editing a trade customer account, use the credit account setting to configure the customer as having a credit account.

You can use the trade customers (credit accounts) setting for the Offline payment method on the platform checkout page to specify that only trade customers with credit accounts can use the offline payment method when creating orders.

Both trade customers and standard customers:

• Login at the same page of your website at /account/login
• Request login links (if they have forgotten their password) at /account/forgotten-password
• Use all the same pages as standard customers for viewing orders, managing their account, and configuring addresses

For more details on these pages refer to the guidance on standard customers.

All ShopWired themes offer various settings options to assist you in customising your website specifically for trade customers.

For more information, refer to the theme guidance on trade customer settings.