6. Customers

The interface lists all the customer groups, and has special links to 'affiliates' and 'mailing list', which are special built-in customer groups.

One of the common requirements of an online store is to hide certain categories and products from all but specific customers. When editing a category, product or version, you will see a dropdown menu selection for 'Limit by group'. In this way, you can link a category, product and/or version to a specific group. In this case, only customers who are logged in to the front end and are members of the appropriate group will be able to see these items. Other customers will not see them, or be able to find them in searches.

Although you can set a % discount at customer level, you may find that this does not give you the direct control you need. You may want to individually price certain items for a specific group, so for example it might be $15.00 for retail customers, or $13.25 for wholesale clients.

Kartris has a tab under versions labelled 'Customer Group Prices' where you can override the price of any version for each customer group. Leaving the price at zero for any group will mean that the item for that group will be at normal price (and not zero!).

Of course, this functionality can enable you to have customer-specific prices too - you can create a customer group and assign just one customer to it, and then set prices for that group.

You can set a % discount for each customer if you wish. This will apply a % discount to the value of all items within the order, excluding shipping, handling and any other costs. This is in addition to any customer group discount applied so care should be taken to not give double-discounts inadvertently.

In Kartris, passwords are hashed for additional security. This means that the raw password is not stored in the database; instead, a function called a 'hash' is used to scramble the password, and this scrambled value is stored. When a customer logs in, the password they give is also scrambled and then compared to the stored scrambled password to make sure they match.

Because the raw password is not stored, the system cannot send the password to the customer as a reminder because the hash is not reversible. Similarly, you cannot find the password of a customer or an admin from the back end, or even by looking directly into the database.

Therefore if a customer loses or forgets their password, it must be reset. There are two ways to do this (1) the store owner can change any customer password from the back end (2) the customer can request a password change from the front end.

In the second case (online request to change password), the customer will be sent a link to the email address of their account that is valid for a limited period (1 hour) and that will allow them to reset their password.

There is no way for a customer to change their own email address in Kartris. The email address is assumed to be unique, and therefore we use this as the username. To avoid various issues with changing email addresses (including verification of the new account to ensure that its owner accepts the change and the problem of existing accounts), we have made changing email addresses a back-end only feature at present. If a customer needs to change their email address, then their only option is to contact the store owner so that an admin can change it for them.

The Kartris back end will check that the email address is not already in use (you cannot have two accounts with the same email), but it will not check that the owner of the new email address consents to the change (i.e. that the person making the change owns the new account), or that someone requesting the change (by telephone or email) is actually the owner of that account.