Account Creation and Login Challenge

Hey all,

We’re redoing our site and have a challenging situation that no one can seem to come up with a good solution to so far.

First, here is the overall context. We are exclusively a wholesaler. We sell only to resellers. We have our wholesale pricing on our site and it has a basic password protection with only one login. So, every one of our customers uses the same login. (It’s crazy, I know! This system was made in 2004 or maybe earlier).

So, moving forward, we are developing a new site and will require everyone to create a unique login.
We have to restrict the Acct Creation process on the site, as we don’t want just anyone to have access. Remember, we have an exclusive customer base. So, we have to have all our customers (I think it’s like 5,000ish) create their own accts… without making it burdensome and annoying to them.

So, what’s the best path for the conversion process?

That is one of the reasons that I started using PHP code generators, i dont want to lose time doing this type of thing anymore.

There you can create the access control amost instant, selection which users will going to be able to see which menu itens (and this way the applications), i dont lose more then 15minutes creating my access control.

What you probably want to do is to not restrict account creation but require approval before a user can access anything sensitive. That is a lesson learned from having to deal with massive overhead of creating/managing accounts for people in various private CMS type systems.

For the tactical concerns here, what I would probably do is send the customers an email with a unique code that will let them create an account and skip the approval rigmarole.