An introduction to trade accounts
A trade customer registers on your website with a trade account, which is different from a normal customer account.
Trade accounts have some special features such as:
- They can be given different pricing options for products.
- They can be given a credit account.
- Your site can be displayed to them in a ‘trade friendly’ way by adjusting your B2B settings.
- You can create a different menu of products and categories which is displayed only to trade customers.
• How customers create and login to their trade accounts
• Managing trade accounts
How customers create and login to their trade accounts
Customer created trade accounts
Trade customers can create an account on your website by using the ‘Trade Application’ page found at the URL account/trade-application. This is a different form than the one that is used to create normal customer accounts.
By default trade customer accounts need to be approved by you before they become active (this enables you to set the pricing option for the trade account before making it live), but you can change this on your B2B settings page.
Trade customer accounts can also be manually created by you in the management system. Click here to learn how to do this.
How customers login
Trade customers login to their account in the same way as your non trade customers, on the account login page found at the URL account/login.
There is no separate login area for trade customers.
Managing trade accounts
To view all of the trade accounts registered on your website select from the menu.
You can search through your trade accounts by entering a name or email address into the search box:
In the ‘Existing Trade Accounts’ section you will see a list of all of your trade accounts:
Business Name tells you the name of the business on the trade account. Selecting the name takes you to the page to edit that account’s information.
Location tells you where the business is located.
Orders tells you how many orders that account has ever placed. Selecting the number takes you to a page showing all of the orders for the account.
Last Order tells you when that account last made an order.
Total Spent tells you how much that account has spent in your store.
Select the icon under Download to download a CSV file of the details for the trade account.
Unless you have altered the setting, new customer created trade accounts will be displayed as inactive. Use the tick box under Active to activate the account. Untick/leave the the box empty if you want to deactivate the account. This will stop the account holder from being able to access the account.
Select the button under Edit to edit the details of the trade account.
Select the bin icon under Delete to delete that trade account.
Warning!
If you delete a trade account all of the information associated with that account (except for the orders they have made) will be lost forever.