Customer Management
Managing Customers Customer management takes place in the Manage Customers submenu of Customers menu. Customer management page displays information on registered customers. Customers can sign up in the front end of a Pipfrog web store and they can also be added by administrators in the back end. The following is an example of what the customer management page looks like. To be able to see the information regarding a customer or to edit it move the mouse to the data row of the customer and click anywhere in the row. This will open a new page displaying more on-depth information on the customer. The information is organized into sections the titles of which are displayed on the left hand of the page in tabs. Information recorded on each customer includes personal data, order history, products in the wish list and shopping cart, but also comments that the customer has left and tags they have used.
Adding New Customers In most cases customers get added to the system automatically when shoppers sign up in the front end of your store. There could be occasions where you would like to add a customer yourself and in a Pipfrog web store this is easy to do. Once on the customer management page (Customers > Manage Customers), click on the Add New Customer button on the top right corner. The following fillable form opens up: This page looks similar to the one you saw when editing an existing customer but it has only two info tabs on the left side. The tabs are Account Information and Addresses. Account Information This section in turn consists of two subsections with the following mandatory fields: Associate to Website choose a website to associate the customer with First Name, Last Name, Email these fields should be self explanatory Customer Group select customer group for the customer depending on tax and price conditions they would have Password password will be emailed to the customer for their initial login; you may create it yourself or check the Send auto-generated password box for automatic generation You may also keep your customer's birth date and tax registration numbers on record and opt to send them your welcoming email by checking the assigned box. Addresses This section will store customer's addresses. Since you are adding a new customer they do not yet have any addresses on record. To add and address click on the Add New Address button.
On the right side of the screen you may now enter the required data in the Edit Customer's Address form. As you type the entries they will appear in the middle of the screen, in the Customer Addresses section. Use the radio buttons in this section to determine whether the address you entered is to be used as default shipping or billing address or both. Please note that once you make the choice you cannot revoke it until you enter another address and set that as default. To add additional addresses, just click on Add New Address. Once you have entered all addresses for the customer use the Save Customer button to add the new customer to the database and return to customer management page. The new customer should now appear on this page along with all others. Customer Groups Organizing customers into groups will enable you as a store owner to tailor the appearance or contents of the store, additional services or discounts applied to different types of customers, etc.. Customer group is a required characteristic of every single customer. When viewers browse your store they are considered to belong to the Not Logged In group. By default, as soon as a shopper signs up to become your registered customer, they are appointed to General group. You may change the default group in the system configuration in the Customer Configuration tab (go to Create New Account Options section and select the customer group from the Default Group field). You can later change a customer's group when editing the customer information. Now, creating a customer group is one step process. Navigate Customers > Customer Groups and click on the Add New Customer Group on the top right corner of the page. Following is a screen print of the page that opens then.
All you have to do here is enter a recognizable name for the group and choose an appropriate tax class. Most of your customer groups will likely fall into the General tax class. If you need to add customer tax classes and want to apply tax rates to customer groups, please refer to the Tax Management guide. Additional Possibilities Using Power Marketing Module One of the features Power Marketing module has is promotions. Promotions can be used to provide sales and discounts to different customer groups. Here you would set up groups such as loyal customers or wholesale customers that you want to give special prices to. Then, when setting catalog and shopping cart price rules in Promotions menu select customer groups for whom a rule would apply. Read more on promotions for customer groups from the Power Marketing guide. Online Customers By navigating Customers > Online Customers you may have a look at which customers are presently logged in and active in the store. Information provided here includes their name and email address, IP address, the time they arrived in the store and last site they visited. By default, this information will be updated every 15 minutes. You may change this time period by navigating System > Configuration and clicking on the Customer Configuration tab in the Customers section on the left. Now go to Online Customers Options tab on the right side and set the desired time in minutes.
Reports Pipfrog provides you with an opportunity to generate reports on customers' activity. Navigate Reports > Customers and select one of the following three reports: New Accounts, Customers by orders total, or Customers by number of orders. Select websites or store views that interest you and pick a time frame. Click on Refresh button to generate the report. You may also export these reports by selecting either CSV or Excel format on the right side of the page and clicking on Export button.