Sometimes it's necessary to add or manage customer information yourself, for instance when helping out somebody who is having a difficulty in using your website. Here's how:
- At the top-right corner of the page, there's an Add New Customer button. By clicking on a row in the results grid, we get the customer's details. We will show the process of adding a new customer briefly because you will generally open already existing customer accounts from the customer grid:
- After clicking on the Add New Customer button, the New Customer screen appears containing two sections: general account information and customer address(es). The first section contains the only mandatory fields: Associate to Website, Customer Group, First Name, Last Name, Email, and Password. In the Associate to Website drop-down list you can choose which website you are registering your new customer to. It's possible to make the customer account available in all the websites that are present in your Magento installation by choosing Admin.
- The e-mail address you enter cannot exist yet within the store to which you are adding the customer. In the Password form you have two choices: either supply a password yourself by entering the new customer's password in the input field, or have Magento send an automatically generated password by ticking the Send auto-generated password checkbox. If you choose to supply a password yourself, do not forget to let your customer know their password!
- In the Addresses section, not surprisingly addresses can be added for the new customer that is being created. Click on the Add New Address button to start adding an address. A form will appear where you can enter the standard address input Magento requires. As a reminder, you can adjust some of the address requirements in the configuration section under System | Configuration | Customer Configuration | Name and Address Options.
- Two radio buttons will also appear after clicking on the Add New Address button: Default Billing Address and Default Shipping Address. By clicking on these radio buttons you can set the address you are entering as the default for billing and or shipping. Setting these makes checking out a little faster and easier for your customer.
- You can make the form switch between the different addresses you are entering by clicking on the small round icon containing horizontal lines as shown in the following screenshot. After you are done filling in the customer details, click on the Save Customer button and the customer grid in your admin will show the new customer!
We just added a customer and optionally provided an address for the new customer as well. It is possible to create multiple address for your new customer, by clicking on the Add New Address button again. A new block also containing the Default Billing Address and Default Shipping Address radio buttons will appear, though you will not see a new address form:
The other, non-mandatory, inputs in the Account Information section are mostly self-evident. The Disable Automatic Group Change Based on VAT ID option below the customer groups drop-down list in the Account Information section is related to the business-to-business feature included in Magento, which is mostly interesting to European companies. It is best left alone for beginning business-to-consumer stores.
More often than adding new customers yourself, you will be looking at or changing their existing information.
Managing existing customers starts by clicking on a row from the customers grid in Customers | Manage Customers. The Customer Information page will open with the Customer View section visible:
Some general information about your customers' activity in your store can be found there. The other sections found in the left-hand column are:
- Account Information: This manages your customers' general information, and works as described above when adding a new customer.
- Addresses: This manages your customer's address(es) , and works the same as described above when adding a new customer.
- Orders: These are the orders your customer has placed.
- Billing Agreements: This is a feature used to arrange recurring billing with PayPal. It is not recommended for use while starting Magento shops, as it is not user-friendly and stable enough at the time of writing.
- Recurring Profiles (beta): Recurring profiles are used to facilitate recurring billing, and are still in beta status. As such, it is not recommended to use at the time of writing.
- Shopping Cart: These are all items currently in your customer's shopping cart.
- Wishlist: These are all items currently placed on your customer's wishlist.
- Newsletters: This manages your customer's newsletter subscriptions.
- Product Reviews: This shows all reviews placed by the customer.
- Product Tags: This shows all tags added to products by the customer.
The Orders section is a standard admin order grid, and clicking on an order inside the grid takes you to the order detail screen for that particular order. The last column of the grid has a reorder link. By clicking on that link, you will be taken to an order creation screen for a new order that has the same items as the original order already added to it:
In the Shopping Cart section a product grid will be visible if your customer has products placed inside the cart. Clicking on a product row in this grid takes you to the product edit screen for that product. The last column of the grid contains Configure and Delete links. The Configure link is greyed out if the product cannot be configured, otherwise it allows you to set the product's options for your customer (their cart will reflect the options you set from the backend). The Delete link behaves as expected, removing the product from the customer's shopping cart:
The product grid containing all products on the customer's wishlist, found in the Wishlist section, behaves similarly to the product grid in the Shopping Cart section. Clicking on a row takes you to the product edit screen for that product and the same Configure and Delete links are present:
In the Newsletter Information section you can tick or untick the checkbox, Subscribed to Newsletter to subscribe or unsubscribe the customer to or from your newsletter, respectively. There is also a grid showing which newsletters have been sent by Magento to this customer. However, as mentioned at the start of this chapter, we do not recommend using Magento's newsletter sending component:
Under Product Reviews, a standard grid shows all reviews placed by the customer, either pending or accepted. By clicking on a review you open the review edit screen for that review, where you can take further actions such as approving or deleting the review.
The Tags section follows a similar logic, allowing you to click through a tag added by the customer and from there either approve or delete a tag.
You have now seen all of the many features and options available in customizing an account. All in all, the bulk of your work when dealing with customer information will be changing general information, (re-)sending passwords, and editing addresses. These can all be done from the Account Information and Addresses sections, and can function the same for new and existing customers.