As an online store owner, managing customer interactions and approvals can be challenging. Ensuring a seamless experience for your customers while maintaining control over your store’s operations is crucial. In this blog post, we will explore effective strategies to manage customer approvals and notifications on your BigCommerce store.
Understanding Customer Approval
Customer approval processes are essential for certain business models. For instance, B2B businesses often need to verify and approve new customer accounts to ensure they meet specific criteria. This step helps in maintaining the quality and relevance of your customer base. On BigCommerce, setting up a customer approval process involves several steps, including customizing your store settings and using third-party apps or custom code to manage approvals efficiently.
Why do eCommerce stores need customer approval?
Customer approval is necessary for online stores, especially B2B eCommerce businesses, because it helps with potential security issues, fraud, and customer groups management.
Reduce fake accounts and fraud
Fraud is an unexpected thing for every eCommerce owner. That’s why merchants should manage new account registrations on their online store. Registration approval not only decreases fake accounts but also assures merchants a higher quality of visitors.
Manage different customer groups
Customer approval is a way to identify customers of different segmentations and permit each group to access certain contents or pages on your website. It’s more crucial when you are running a B2B and B2C eCommerce business or selling your products to wholesalers. For example, you’ll allow wholesale customers to access wholesale categories which consumer customers can’t. Or, you can launch an exclusive marketing program to only groups of customers you want.
Prove the credibility to customers
A strict registration process means that customers will worry less about risks with their information when logging and making transactions on your website. Therefore, they will trust your eCommerce business.
Guide to manually approve account registration on BigCommerce
1. Create two customer groups: one for guest and new accounts that don’t have access to any categories (Pending Accounts group, for example), and another for approved accounts that have access to your categories (Approved Accounts group).
To create new groups, go to Customers → Customer Groups → Create a Customer Group.
2. Assign products to the group which you want them to see. If you want to hide certain products from unapproved customers, don’t assign these products to the group.
3. When a new customer creates an account, he will be auto-added to the Pending Accounts group, and you will receive a notification.
4. Review the customer and then manually assign to the Approved Accounts group if you accept.
Go to Customers → View Customers, select the Approved Accounts group from the Group drop-down list. Your change will be automatically saved.
How to notify customers after being approved by using Atom8
To notify customers after you have approved their account, you need to use an integrated platform having this feature to help you. Consider the Atom8 automation app. Atom8 allows BigCommerce store owners to notify customers automatically without manually doing that.
The automation workflow is set up as follow:
TRIGGER: When the customer is updated
CONDITION: If the customer group is equal to Approved Accounts
ACTION: Send an email to the customer via Mailchimp
Additionally, you would want to get notified whenever there is a new registration on the store. The Atom8 can also help. When a customer creates a new account on your store, Atom8 will automatically send your team a notification email and add a card on the Trello board so that your team will know immediately.
To set up the workflow:
TRIGGER: When a new customer account is created
ACTION: Send an internal notification email to xxx@yourteamemail
ACTION: Add a Trello card
So, you can save a lot of time and effort with these tasks. Atom8 app also has many other useful features that support repetitive activities to streamline your operation, such as:
- Auto-segmenting customers based on location, order value, the total number of orders, etc. and auto-tagging customers on CRM and email marketing platforms;
- Auto-sending notification email to internal team or suppliers when a product is out of stock, etc.;
- Auto-generating order information, low-stock products, etc. on a spreadsheet;
- Auto-publishing products, categories;
- Auto-publishing sale price, content, switching themes, etc. for promotion programs;
- Auto-tracking discount codes and coupons.
Furthermore, you can take advantage of Atom8 to automate any workflow you need. It all depends on your own idea.
Conclusion
Managing customer approvals and notifications effectively is crucial for maintaining a positive customer experience and ensuring smooth operations on your BigCommerce store. By leveraging the built-in features of BigCommerce and integrating powerful tools like Atom8, you can streamline these processes and focus on growing your business. Whether it’s automating content scheduling, managing inventory, or engaging with customers, Atom8 offers a comprehensive solution to enhance your store’s efficiency and performance.
For more information on how Atom8 can transform your BigCommerce store, visit Atom8 for BigCommerce.
