Customer accounts

Getting started

There are important security considerations involved in user account management. If this is your first Drupal site, see the Managing User Accounts documentation, in the Drupal 8 User Guide, for a good introduction. This documentation page will focus only on aspects of user accounts that are specific to Drupal Commerce. Within Drupal Commerce, we refer to users and user accounts as customers and customer accounts even though they are actually the same entities. A customer is simply a user who has placed an order on your site.

Customizing customer accounts

The Registration and Cancellation settings for your customer accounts are located at /admin/config/people/accounts. To reduce cart abandonment, you will typically want to allow Visitors to register accounts without administrator approval. Requiring email verification may also be a deterrent to new customers, but you may decide that it's necessary for your particular site.

Handling canceled user accounts will also require some consideration. On the one hand, Drupal Commerce does guard against deleted users, to prevent breakage when historical orders reference users that no longer exist. So you can completely delete users if you want. On the other hand, there may be legal or financial implications with respect to retaining certain customer information.

Registration and cancellation settings

In addition to configuring Account settings, you may also want to add custom fields to your customer accounts. Use the Manage fields administrative page at /admin/config/people/accounts/fields to add custom fields. In a default Drupal installation, you will see a user Picture field and, if you have the Commerce Payment module enabled, you will also see a Remote ID field. If you won't use the Picture field, it's fine to delete it. The Remote ID field is locked and shouldn't be deleted, since it's necessary for Commerce Payment functionality.

Custom account fields

Including profiles in user registration

As described in the Profile management documentation, profile types have an "include in user registration form" setting. If enabled, a form for a profile of that type will be included in the user registration form. This option is useful if you want to collect information about customers right when they register. For example, an "Account information" profile type has been created with "contact phone" and "purchasing agent" fields. It is configured for inclusion on the user registration form:

Profile included in user registration form

When a customer registers an account on the site, an "Account information" section appears on the registration form:

User registration form with included profile

Managing customer accounts

The list of all user accounts, including both customers and administrative users is available on the People administrative page at /admin/people. You can customize this page by configuring its View settings at /admin/structure/views/view/user_admin_people.

There are many contributed Drupal modules that can help you manage customer accounts or provide additional functionality. See the User management modules listing. For example, Commerce sites often allow users to log in with their email addresses. By default, Drupal only allows login by username, but you can add this functionality with the simple Login Email or Username module or the slightly more complex Email Registration module.

Found errors? Think you can improve this documentation? edit this page