Customer accounts (buyer-facing)

A customer account is the signed-in area of your storefront, reached at /account. From there a shopper can view their order history, manage saved addresses, edit their profile, and see their store-credit and reward balance. Sign-in is passwordless: customers receive a one-time code (OTP) by email or SMS, so there is nothing for them to remember and nothing for you to reset.

This page covers how customers sign in, what the account area contains, and the controls you have over it — login methods, require sign-in before checkout, and inviting or enabling individual accounts.

Customer accounts and staff accounts

This is the buyer-facing customer account system. It is different from staff accounts, which are the logins your team uses to run the admin.

How customers sign in

Sellerlane accounts are passwordless. A shopper enters either their email or their phone number, receives a one-time code, and is signed in once they enter it — no password is ever set.

1. The customer opens /account (or clicks an account link in your theme). If they are not signed in they are sent to /account/login.

2. They enter their email or phone number, depending on which login methods your store allows.

3. Sellerlane sends a one-time verification code to that email or phone and shows the verify step.

4. They enter the code. On success they are signed in. If no customer record exists yet for that email or phone, one is created automatically at this point — so a first-time visitor and a returning customer use the exact same flow.

Codes expire and are rate-limited: after 5 failed code attempts the customer must request a new code, and repeated requests from the same address are throttled. Signing out is done from the account area and clears the session.

Verify code delivery before enabling login

Because sign-in relies on a delivered code, the contact method a customer logs in with must be one your store can actually reach. Make sure transactional email is deliverable (see emails) before you rely on email login, and confirm SMS/OTP delivery is configured before you rely on phone login.

Choosing login methods

Two store-level switches decide which identifiers a customer can use to sign in:

• Email login — customers sign in with an email address.
• Phone login — customers sign in with a phone number.

Both are enabled by default. They also gate the contact method you can use at checkout, so they are validated together with your checkout settings:

• A checkout Contact method of Email only requires email login to be on.
• Phone only requires phone login to be on.
• Phone or email requires both to be on.

If a combination is inconsistent — for example require sign-in before checkout is on but no login method is enabled — Sellerlane rejects the save with an error so you cannot lock customers out by accident.

Require sign-in before checkout

By default, customers can check out as guests. Turn on Require sign-in before checkout to force every shopper to sign in (with the OTP flow above) before they can reach the payment step.

1. Go to Settings → Checkout.

2. In the Checkout behavior card, turn on Require sign-in before checkout. The helper text reads “Customers must sign in before proceeding to checkout.”

3. Click Save changes.

Tip

Requiring sign-in ties every order to a verified email or phone and a customer record, which makes order history, store credit, and segments more reliable. The trade-off is a small amount of added friction at checkout, so most stores leave it off and let shoppers check out as guests.

You can only enable this when at least one login method is on — otherwise there is no way for the customer to sign in, and the setting is rejected.

What customers see in their account

Once signed in, customers use the system account pages below. Their appearance follows the account branding and supported storefront settings; changing a theme does not change the financial meaning of a reward.

Section	Path	What it shows
Dashboard	/account	Account overview with recent orders
Orders	/account/orders	Full, paginated order history; each order opens at /account/orders/{id}
Profile	/account/profile	Name and contact details
Addresses	/account/addresses	Saved addresses, with add (/new) and edit (/{id}/edit)
Rewards	/account/rewards	Loyalty points, eligible redemption options, referrals, store-credit history, and typed review-reward statuses

Addresses can be added, edited, and set as the default. The same address book is used to pre-fill checkout.

Understand the Rewards page

Points, store credit, and discount codes are different things. The page brings them together without turning them into a single cash balance.

Panel	What the customer can see or do
Loyalty	Available points, pending/reserved points, history, VIP membership and expiry, and configured earning actions
Redeem points	Supported discount rewards and their current points cost; eligibility, points balance, and Personal context still apply
Pending awards	Why a purchase reward is held, its order reference, and an estimated release when available
Referrals	Personal referral link, aggregate activity, and pending/rewarded counts; pending referral records do not expose the friend’s private order details
Store credit	Personal balance and a ledger with search, direction/reason filters, sorting, and pagination
Promotional adjustments	Invalidated, recovered, waived, expired, and outstanding promotional value
Review rewards	Separate entries showing reward type, usable code or amount when issued, status, and relevant dates

The supported points-redemption catalog does not currently expose new gift card or store-credit rewards. Legacy records can still appear in financial history. See loyalty and referrals for the current supported reward types.

Pending does not mean spendable

A purchase can award pending points before those points become usable. The reason may be uncollected COD, undelivered items, a service that has not finished, an open return/refund, or the saved return window and reward hold. An estimated release is conditional on continued eligibility, not a guaranteed payout time. Changing today’s return policy does not shorten an earlier order’s saved hold.

Example: an apparel order earns 100 pending points, but one line has an open return. The customer should see the hold instead of a usable 100-point discount. After the return is resolved, the retained purchase is checked again.

For details staff can act on, open the member in Loyalty. Pending rewards and Pending referral rewards show a reason and suggested action. A review hold is not a finding that the customer committed fraud. Do not issue a manual replacement merely because a pending record is taking longer than expected.

Personal shopping and company shopping

A person can belong to a company and still shop personally. Their personal reward history remains useful, but Personal context is required for personal reward actions. Company checkout does not spend personal loyalty rewards or personal promotional credit, and B2B purchases do not qualify as personal reward purchases. Company-location credit belongs to a separate business account.

Example: Kavitha sees her personal points while signed in as a company buyer. To redeem a personal reward on her own T-shirt purchase, she switches to Personal shopping. Changing company membership does not transfer those points to the company.

Review rewards have explicit states

An issued discount shows its usable code; issued store credit shows its amount. Pending, used, expired, revoked, canceled, and failed entries are displayed with their status rather than presented as new spendable rewards. The review-submission flow separately distinguishes no available offer, ineligibility, a temporary reward lookup failure, and an older loyalty offer whose missing terms require the store to investigate. A missing historical offer is not a promise of zero points or a reason to submit another review.

A saved review and a successfully issued reward are separate outcomes. If the review was saved but reward details cannot load, refresh the reward view; do not submit the review again to try to obtain another reward. Staff can inspect review reward records by opening the review under Reviews → Reviews.

Reversals and changes while a page is open

A returned qualifying purchase may reduce points or invalidate promotional credit. The page can show an outstanding promotional adjustment even with a zero spendable balance. That is unrecovered promotional benefit, not a cash charge. The exact ₹800 cash + ₹200 promotional-credit refund example is in store credit.

If a reward’s price or terms change after the page loads, follow the changed-offer message: refresh, review the current offer, and choose again. Do not promise the old price based only on an open browser tab. Pausing a program does not erase its balance and history views.

History and spendable value

Lifetime net rewards is issued referral value minus recovered reversals. It is not the current spendable balance: spending, expiry and recovery waivers have separate meanings. Use the store-credit balance for available credit. Rewards: settings and recovery explains saved offers and refund outcomes. If a panel fails to load, use its refresh/retry action; a loading error is not an empty balance.

Managing accounts from the admin

Every signed-in shopper, and anyone you add manually, appears under Customers in the admin. Open a customer to manage their account. Each account has a status, shown as a badge on the customer’s page:

Status	Badge	Meaning
Enabled	green	The customer can sign in to their account
Disabled	grey	The customer cannot sign in (default for records you create)
Invited	blue	An invite has been sent and is awaiting the customer
Declined	red	The customer declined the invitation

Add a customer

1. Go to Customers and click Add customer.

2. Choose the login type — Email or Phone. The option is only available if that login method is enabled for your store; if neither is enabled you can still create a record with no login identifier.

3. Enter the email or phone, name, and any tags, notes, or marketing consent.

4. Optionally tick Send invite to email the customer an invitation to activate their account, then save.

Enable, disable, send, or resend an invite

Open the customer and use the Actions menu in the top right. The available actions depend on the current status:

• Enable Customer — turns a disabled account on so the customer can sign in. This is only available once the customer has a login identifier (an email or phone); without one the menu shows “Add login identifier to enable”.
• Disable Customer — turns an enabled account off.
• Send Invite — emails an account invitation. Available for enabled or disabled accounts that have a login identifier.
• Resend Invite — re-sends the invitation to a customer who is in the Invited state.

Invitations are optional

Customers do not strictly need an invite. Because sign-in is self-serve OTP, a shopper can simply go to /account/login and verify their email or phone. The invite is a convenience — a direct prompt to activate the account.

Filter the customer list by status

On the Customers list you can filter by account status (Enabled, Disabled, Invited, Declined) alongside filters for email/phone verification, whether the customer has orders, marketing consent, tags, and tax exemption. Use this to find, for example, everyone who was invited but has not yet signed in.

Troubleshooting

• A customer says they never got the code. Codes are delivered by email or SMS. Confirm your transactional email is deliverable, check the spam folder, and have them request a fresh code (the previous one may have expired or been rate-limited after repeated attempts).
• “Email login is disabled for this store” when adding a customer. Enable email login (or pick the phone login type instead). The same applies to phone login.
• You cannot turn on require sign-in before checkout. At least one login method must be enabled first, or the setting is rejected.
• Enable Customer is greyed out. The account has no login identifier. Add an email or phone to the customer first, then enable.
• Guests are checking out without an account. That is expected unless require sign-in before checkout is on. Turn it on under Settings → Checkout to require a signed-in customer.

Next steps

Customers & segments

Organize your customer list and build self-maintaining segments.

Store credit

Manage the store-credit balances customers see on their rewards page.

Checkout settings

Tune contact method, fields, and sign-in under shipping & checkout.

Staff accounts

Manage admin logins — separate from buyer accounts — under staff accounts.