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Managing Customers

You have to take good care of your customers. That means making sure their profile contains all the information you need to have a package shipped to them, following up on their support requests, creating special discount groups, knowing which orders have been completed and which have been abandoned, and much more.

The "Customers" menu enables you to check on your customers' details, create groups to which you can apply discounts, view the current shop carts, handle customer service, etc.

When installed for the first time with sample data, PrestaShop has a default user, named John DOE.

You can use this fake user to test some of your shop's features, and generally browse your shop and see it the way a regular user would.

To log in to your shop using this public account, use these credentials:

Before you open your shop to the public, make sure to delete this default user, or at least change its credentials! If not, malicious visitors could use it to make fake purchases and more.

Your customers

The first page under the "Customers" menu gives you a list of all the registered users on your shop.

This gives you a bird's eye view of your customers, with some details thrown in which you can use to sort and search accounts:

Below the customers table is the "Set required fields for this section" button. It opens a form where you can indicate if a database field is necessary or not by checking the appropriate boxes: this way, you can make it so fields such as "newsletter" or "optin" are mandatory when a visitor is creating a customer account on your shop.

You can export a list of your clients by clicking on the "Export" button at the top.
You can also import customers using the "Import" button. You will need your CSV file to follow this format:

ID;Title;Last name;First Name;Email address;Age;Enabled;News.;Opt.;Registration;Last visit;
2;1;Gorred;Francis;[email protected];-;1;0;0;2013-07-04 15:20:02;2013-07-04 15:18:50;
1;1;DOE;John;[email protected];43;1;1;1;2013-07-02 17:36:07;2013-07-03 16:04:15;

More import options are available in the "CSV Import" page of the "Advanced parameters" menu.

Creating A New Customer Account

To create a customer account manually, select "Add New". A form appears.

Fill out the customer's information:

If your customers are mostly companies, you should enable the B2B mode in order to get additional options: go to the "Customers" page of the "Preferences" menu, and choose "Yes" for the "Enable B2B mode" option.

Viewing A User's Information

In the case where you would like to have more information on a given customer, you can click on the "view" button, located at the end of the row in the customer's list. A new page appears.

The various sections provide you with some key data on the user:

Searching for a Customer

Searching for a customer on your PrestaShop shop can be done two different ways.

The first method is to enter the information you have into the PrestaShop search bar, which is found in the top center of your back-office. By selecting "everywhere", "by name" or "by ip address", you can perform a search based on:

The results, if any, are then presented: the list presents you with the users' ID, social title, e-mail, birthday, registration date, amount of orders and whether or not the user's account is active. From there on, you can view the whole user's page, or edit its details.

The second method consists of going to the "Customers" page, and listing all of your customers.

On this page, you can complete the fields at the top of the list, in order to filter it according to the following criteria: ID, social title, first name, last name, e-mail address, age, account status (enabled or disabled), subscription to the newsletter, subscription to partnering ads, registration date, and last connection date. Enter your criteria and click the "Filter" button in the top right-hand corner of the table. You can then sort the list for some of the columns.

Click the "Reset" button to go back to the complete list.

Addresses

By clicking on the "Addresses" page, you will have access to the list of your customer's home addresses. You can edit them using the "Edit" button, or delete them altogether.

You also have the possibility to create them yourself with the "Add New" button.

Below the addresses table is the "Set required fields for this section" button. It opens a form where you can indicate if a database field is necessary or not by checking the appropriate boxes: this way, you can make it so fields such as "company" or "phone number" are mandatory when a customer is registering a new address on your shop.

Groups

PrestaShop enables you to give your customers certain privileges, by assigning them to Groups. You can create as many customer groups as needed, and assign a user to as many groups as you like.

This is all done from the "Groups" page, under the "Customers" menu.

By default, three special groups are available:

These three groups replace the "Default" group from PrestaShop 1.4, which applied to all users. They cannot be deleted.

To create more groups, click the "Add New" button: you will get a creation form.

Once these settings are in place, you can save the group as-is, or add per-category and/or per-module settings, by clicking on either the "Save" button or the "Save then add a category reduction" one.

In that second case, the form will reload with two more options:

You can add a customer to a group of your choice by editing a customer's details: from the list of customers (in the "Customers" page under the "Customers" menu), click on the Edit icon on the customer's line. Then, on the "Groups" table, select the group(s) to which you want your customer to belong.

Shopping Carts

PrestaShop contains some very powerful marketing features that enable you to see the products that customers are adding to their carts in real time. There are two ways to achieve this:

  1. Go to the "Clients" page in the "Clients" menu, find the customer you are looking for, and view his or her customer profile. In that profile, scroll down to the "Shopping carts" section, where you can see all the carts created by this customer.
  2. Go to the "Shopping carts" page in the "Clients" menu. The carts are sorted by ID. Find the customer you are looking for.

In both cases, you can click the "View" icon to see the content of your client's cart, and use this information to improve your commercial performance.

Click the "View" icon on the right to get the cart's details.

In the cart's page, the most important information is in the "Cart Summary" section, where you can see what products the customer chose to purchase, the price of each item, the quantity they put in their cart, and the total value of their cart.

Cart abandonment often means that a sale has been lost.  The "Shopping cart" page indicates the carts that have not been turned into proper orders, and it is up to you to remind the customer that they can still come back to finish their purchase.

Abandoned carts (or "ghost carts") will have a delete link at the end of each row, while carts without delete links are processed carts, i.e. the purchase has been confirmed and you are supposed to send the products.

By default, it is up to you to contact the customer about his abandoned cart. You can install the Customer Follow-up module, which is available in the default installation and enables you to send vouchers to those who have abandoned their shopping carts, or to those who you want to thank for their order, to the best clients to thank them for their purchases and for being faithful... Note that this can lead to abuse: some customers might abandon carts on purpose in order to receive a voucher...

You can also buy PrestaShop's Abandoned Cart Reminder module for a complete tool: http://addons.prestashop.com/en/checkout-modules/3503-abandoned-cart-reminder.html.

Customer Service

PrestaShop enables you to centralize all the customers' request within its confines. This helps you keep track of which discussion threads needs answering, rather than having to check with all the recipients of the mail to see if someone did answer it.

In practice, the contact form of your shop, available under the "Contact us" link at the bottom of your front-office, presents the customer with two contacts by default: "Webmaster" and "Customer Service". The customer only has to choose who to contact, and then fill the rest of the fields. The message is then recorded in PrestaShop's customer service tool.

Discussion threads are only included in the customer service tool if the contact has the "Save Message?" option enabled. You can change this setting, or add more contacts, by going to the "Contact" page, under the "Customers" menu. This page is explained in detail in the next section of this chapter of the PrestaShop User Guide.

If the option is disabled for the contact that the customer chooses, the message is simply sent to the contact's e-mail address, and is not stored in PrestaShop.

You also need to properly configure your IMAP settings, so that PrestaShop can retrieve the customer's answers to e-mail that were sent from the customer service tool. This is done in the "Customer service options" section.

On this page, each contact has its own box, where you can quickly see if a there are new messages (meaning, those that have not yet been read). By default there are two, and adding more contacts will move the "Meaning of status" and "Customer service: statistics" boxes further to the left and down.

These two last boxes are handy when you need to handle new messages daily:

Further below is the list of received messages, both old and new.

You can edit a couple options at the bottom of the page, which apply to all contacts:

Finally, the bottom of the page features the "Customer service options" section, where you can set many options pertaining to your mail (IMAP) server.

Handling Customer Service Messages

Each conversation with a customer can be entirely handled through PrestaShop's complete interface, without having to use an e-mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird.

In the conversation list, click on a row to view to view the conversation's details:

Clicking "Reply to this message" will display a form with your default message. The default message is set in the "Contacts" page as set in the "Contacts" page.

Customer Service Options

This section basically enables you to precisely configure PrestaShop's access to your e-mail server through its IMAP interface. You should make sure all fields are filled in order for the customer service tool to work properly. Most of this information should be provided by your webhost.

Contacts

To facilitate communication with your clients, you can create multiple contact accounts. For example: customer service, technical support, sales department, etc. This feature allows your customers to directly contact the right person according to their needs.

To contact the appropriate team of employees from your shop's front-office, the customer clicks either on the "Contact" link at the top of the page, or on the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the page. The contact form appears.

The customer is then asked to choose the service to contact, enter the e-mail address and then complete the message. A drop-down menu makes it possible to choose which order is being discussed, and even which product from that order.

In order for the message to be redirected to the intended recipient, you must configure the contacts in your shop.

By clicking on the "Contacts" page under the "Customers" menu, you can access the existing list of contacts.

Click the "Add new" button to access the contact creation form:

Social Titles

Previous versions of PrestaShop had hard-coded customer genders: a customer could only choose between "Mr.", "Ms." and "Miss".

The social title tool helps you better define your customers: in the customers list, you can choose to only display customers having a given social title. Modules may also rely on social titles for certain features.

Clicking on the "Add new" button brings you to a form:

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