Settings related to the way Magento sends e-mail and manages customer accounts are often overlooked during initial set up of Magento. Unjustly so, however, as omissions in these configuration sections can lead to things such as strange address forms for the region where you are active, your order e-mails getting sent from non-existing addresses, to a non-working contact form! In this chapter we will first discuss setting up the most important configuration options related to communication and customer accounts. After that we will show how customer accounts look in the frontend and how to manage all customer accounts in your store from the backend.
In this chapter, you will learn:
- Setting up guest checkouts
- The basics for sending out newsletters
- Configuring contact details
- Adding new and amending existing customers' profiles
Magento differentiates between orders placed by guests and orders placed by registered customers. The big difference between the two modes of order placement is that the order information (such as billing and shipping information) for guest orders can only be found by opening the actual order under Sales | Orders. A customer that places an order by logging in or registering has a customer account, where all the order information also can be found, that is, you can find the customer and her or his order under Sales | Orders and Customers | Manage Customers.
Another way to think about it is: guest orders are one-off orders and do not allow Magento to tie the order to a customer account. Orders by logged in customers are tied to a customer account.
Customers, who have a customer account but then place a guest order, will not have that order shown in their customer account. This can create a bit of confusion for your customer service as well as customers. It is because of this, that it should be carefully considered if you want to allow guest checkouts or not. On the other hand, offering a guest checkout option has been shown to increase the number of sales in some stores to a great deal, even 40 percent increases are reported due to guest checkout options!
The first step in Magento's standard one page checkout is the choice for guest checkout (if enabled), logging in or registering.
Magento offers a configuration setting located in System | Configuration | Checkout | Checkout Options, called Allow Guest Checkout. If you set this to no and save it, all of your customers will have to either log in or register during checkout. However, allowing guest checkouts can (greatly) increase the number of customers who successfully place orders in your store, so we generally advise to keep the option for guest checkout turned on as follows:
