Registering for an account is a fairly straightforward process for your customers, as can be seen in the following steps:
- Registering from the My Account section is straightforward and starts when you click on the My Account button, located at the top of the page in a default theme. After that, click on the Create an Account button in the left column:
- The next screen shows us the First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Password, and Confirm Password fields. Magento recognizes a customer account solely on the basis of supplied e-mail address, so later when logging in only the e-mail address and password are needed:
- Submit the form. Now there are two options. The first is that the newly created account needs to be confirmed, which will be indicated with a message. You will get an e-mail containing the confirmation link, and after clicking on that you will have access to the customer account. The second option is that the account confirmation is not necessary; your customers will have access to their account immediately after registering in that case. As mentioned earlier, as a store owner you can set whether account confirmation is needed in System | Configuration | Customer Configuration | Require Emails Confirmation.
After clicking on the Submit button, you will be taken to the customer account, where the first thing your customers will see is the customer dashboard. The dashboard displays the customer's general contact information, newsletter subscription, and address information.
The left-hand menu is the main navigation of the customer account and allows your customers to go to the different sections of their customer account. We will discuss the various menu options relatively briefly here; it is wise to get familiar with them by experimenting with the various forms and settings a customer can use, since those customers will have questions about it. It also gives you a better feeling of what you are doing when you are changing customer information from Magento's admin panel. You cannot break anything related to the functioning of the store by clicking around in a customer account from the frontend. The most important sections are:
- Account Information: This allows a customer to change their first name, last name, e-mail address, and password.
- Address Book: A customer can enter a new address here. After saving the first address, a customer can choose to use different addresses for billing and shipping by clicking on the Add New Address button.
- My Orders: This gives us an overview of all placed orders, regardless of their order status. From this section the customer can also click through the invoices and shipment information.
- My Product Reviews: This is a list of all reviews placed by the customer who is logged in.
- My Tags: This is a list of all the tags a customer has entered into the store.
- My Wishlist: This is a list of items the customer has marked to save on her/his wishlist.
- Newsletter Subscriptions: Here a customer can subscribe to or unsubscribe from your newsletter.
- My Downloadable Products: This is the collection of downloadable products available to your customer.
As you can see in the following screenshot, there are more sections. However, these are features much less used by most stores and/or customers.
