Customers & Accounts

Customers & Accounts

ZingaShop keeps a record for every person who buys from or signs up on your storefronts. Customer records tie together identity, contact details, addresses, order history, marketing consent, and group membership, and they connect to a shared identity spine so the same person is recognized across Zingasuite.

Customer records

A customer record holds:

• Identity — first and last name, email, primary and alternate phone, optional date of birth, gender, and company name.
• Commerce data — lifetime value, order count, last order date, preferred locale and currency.
• Group and tax — customer group membership and whether the customer is tax-exempt.
• Marketing — whether they accept marketing, and when consent was given.
• Acquisition — how you acquired them (source, campaign, medium, referrer, referred-by), useful for understanding your channel mix.
• Addresses — any number of billing and shipping addresses, with defaults.

Customers are created automatically at checkout and signup, and you can also add or edit them from the back office, for example to set up a corporate account or import a legacy list. A record can exist before the person ever signs in, so you can open an account and add details over time.

The shared identity spine

Every ZingaShop customer is linked to Zingasuite's shared contacts identity spine, the same one used by ZingaConnect (the CRM app). This means:

• A ZingaShop customer and a CRM contact for the same person are unified by email or phone.
• Marketing consent and opt-outs are honored consistently across ZingaShop and ZingaConnect.
• Contact tags are shared, so a segment built in the CRM can reflect commerce behavior and vice versa.

In practice, your storefront and your marketing see one view of each customer rather than two disconnected lists.

The customer account portal

Each storefront includes a self-service account area at /account, where signed-in customers can:

• View their order history and track shipments.
• Manage their saved addresses.
• Download their digital purchases and files (subject to visibility rules).
• Manage their profile and marketing preferences.

Signup, login, and password reset pages accompany the account area. Login is identifier-first: customers sign in with either their email or their phone number in a single field, and can use a password or a one-time code.

Login realms per storefront

The set of customers who can log in to a given storefront is its login realm. By default, all your storefronts share one universal customer pool, so a customer who registers on one storefront is recognized on the others (the model used by large marketplaces with regional sites like a .com and a .in).

You can change this per storefront:

• Shared realm — group specific storefronts so they share a customer pool.
• Isolated — keep a storefront's customers entirely separate.

Identity lookups (including guest checkout matching) happen within the storefront's realm, so customers are neither wrongly merged nor wrongly split across the sites you intend.

Guest checkout and proto-customers

Guest checkout is supported and is never fully anonymous: the first checkout step captures an email or phone identifier and creates a lightweight customer record, so you can follow up on an abandoned order and unify the buyer with their account if they later sign up.

Customer groups

Customer groups let you segment your customers for pricing and visibility. Each group has a code, a name, a tax-exempt flag, and can be used to:

• Assign group-specific price lists (see Pricing & Price Lists) for wholesale, VIP or trade pricing.
• Restrict which products and categories are visible to which groups.

There is also an anonymous group representing not-logged-in visitors, so you can control what the public sees versus what signed-in or trade customers see.

Managing customers

Customers, groups and addresses are managed in the Zingasuite portal at https://console.zingasuite.com, under Customers. They can also be managed through the public API for imports and integrations, described in the Developer API Reference chapter.