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Is there a use case for associating a customer with the admin store in Magento's backend? Or is this one of those UI bugs that's never been fixed?

When you create a customer object via the Customers -> Manage Customers section of the Admin, Magento allows you to choose which store the customer's associated with. The admin store is included in this list.

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Why does Magento let you do this? An admin customer account would (seem to?) be useless. Is there a legitimate use case for this, or can this be classified as UI/UX bug?

Alana Storm
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2 Answers2

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At first this appeared useless to me, but some time ago, while working on a project, the guys (actually the girls) in the sales department actually requested such a feature.
Here is the most common scenario they used it for.

Some of the customers did not order online (technologically impaired customers). They call the sales phone number and said I want to buy this and that.
Then the person from sales created the order in the backend. Some of the customers called more than once. Saving the customer (with a dummy e-mail address) and associating him to the admin website allowed the sales department to easily identify the customer when creating the second order.

This way the customer is not bothered with an account and the internal processes run just like the customer placed the order himself.

This may not be the real reason behind this "feature" but I found a real life case when this applies.

Marius
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I think the fact that they call it "admin" makes it seem worded a bit wrong. I think there are plenty of use cases for wanting a customer segment that is not someone ordering on the website. As Marius said, you might have people calling in phone orders and a CSR taking the call. They have to make a customer, and while it might be convenient for some to make it a front-end customer, others might choose to only have it as admin customer.

I think the implementation is rather half-assed and probably is a legacy left over from another (simpler) time, but I'm sure there are custom modules out there that rely on this in some way (think ETSY, eBay, etc where customers might create products).

pspahn
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