Customer accounts

Enable visitors to save and access their payment, shipping, and order information.

Customer accounts can increase repeat spending and help you build a deeper relationship with your visitors. With this feature enabled, visitors can create accounts on your site where they'll securely save payment methods, shipping addresses, shopping carts, and online order information. 

Any visitor to your site can create a customer account, but account holders are typically customers, donors, member site members, and email campaign mailing list subscribers.

Eligibility

You can enable customer accounts if:

• You're on a Business, Commerce, Professional, or Premium plan
, or you've subscribed to Member Sites.
• You have SSL enabled
 with the preference set to Secure. For help, visit Getting started with SSL.
• You've enabled checkout on your domain. Both built-in .squarespace.com URLs and custom domains are eligible.

Enable customer accounts

To enable customer accounts:

1. Open the Customer accounts panel.
2. Switch the toggle on.

How account holders log in

Your site visitors can create and sign into their accounts using an account login link on your site. This link may display automatically, depending on your site's version.

Logging in from the order status page

Customers can also log in or create an account from the order status page. When they visit the page, they’ll have the option to enter their email address and a confirmation code included in the order confirmed email. After they do this, they can review the billing and shipping details for the order. Then, they can log in or create a new account with those details.

Manually create a sign in link

All version 7.1 sites and some version 7.0 templates automatically create an account login link in your navigation menu. If you’re using a different version 7.0 template, or want to add this link elsewhere on your site, you can do it manually:

1. Add a navigation, text, or image link.
2. For the link URL, enter /account/login
3. Save the link.

The /account/login link brings visitors to the homepage and displays the login window. Unlike the built-in link, the text for a manually created account link won't change after a visitor logs in.

View all customer accounts

The Contacts panel shows all customers, mailing list subscribers, members, and donors on your site. If a contact has a customer account associated with it, it'll display a check in the Account column.

To view all customer account holders:

1. Open the Contacts panel.
2. Click All.
3. Click More filters, then switch the toggle beside Has account on.
4. Click Apply.

To view only the account holders of a specific type, click Customers, Subscribers, Members, or Donors in the left panel before filtering your search.

Delete a customer account

Site owners and contributors with Administrator or Store Manager permissions can delete an account holder's customer account from their contact information in the Contacts panel.

Before you begin, keep in mind:

• You can't delete the customer account from a customer with active product subscriptions or a member of a member site with recurring membership fees.
• Deleting a customer account deletes all payment information, shipping addresses, and billing addresses from that user's contact information.
• If you delete a customer account, the user's contact remains, along with their order history and contact information. To delete the contact entirely, visit The Contacts panel.

To delete a customer account from a contact:

1. Open the Contacts panel.
2. Click the contact you want to edit.
3. Click Delete customer account.

Tip: If the same user later creates a new customer account with the same email address, they’ll have access to their entire order history on your site.

Customize account emails

Customer account holders receive these automated emails from your site:

• Account created
• Email verification
• Reset password
• Password updated

Depending on the account holder's contact type—customer, subscriber, member, or donor—they may receive more emails. Learn more about these emails and how to customize them in Customer email notifications.

Email verification

Customers receive an email prompting them to verify that they have access to the email address on file for their customer account. If they don't verify their email address, they may notice a banner in their customer account prompting them to. If they don't have access to the email address they signed up with, they should create a new customer account with the correct email address.

Saved payment methods

How your customers save payment methods to their account depends on your site's payment processor. Customers, members, and donors can save payment methods during checkout, or by logging into their account. If they don't have an account, they'll have the option to create one during checkout.

Tip: Only account holders can edit their saved payment information and shipping addresses. You can't edit this information on their behalf.

Stripe

If your site is connected to Stripe and not in test mode, account holders can securely save credit card payment information to their customer accounts. When viewing a saved credit card, only the last four digits of the card are visible.

Saved credit card information is stored in Stripe. If you disconnect or switch your Stripe account:

• Account holders can't update their payment information or use saved cards connected to their account.
 To resolve this, they'll need to delete and re-save their saved payment information. If you reconnect to the same Stripe account, they can once again use their saved payment methods.
• Customers with ongoing subscriptions or memberships will need to re-subscribe, which will save their payment details to your new Stripe account. 

Apple Pay

Because Apple Pay is built for a quick checkout experience, account holders can’t log into their account during an Apple Pay checkout. If they’re already logged in, they can complete checkout normally.

PayPal

It's not possible to save PayPal accounts to a customer account. If your site is only connected to PayPal, and not Stripe, the Payment area won’t appear in the customer account panel.

Help your account holders

You're responsible for helping account holders with any issues they may have when accessing their customer accounts. How you manage them and their accounts is up to you. There are best practices you can follow to ensure your account holders have a smooth experience, like displaying contact information and store policies.

When helping account holders with their login email and passwords, keep in mind:

• We can't help your account holders directly.
• It's not possible to change an account holder's email address or password on their behalf.
• Customers, members, and donors can only reset their password when they try to log into their account before checkout. The option to reset their password doesn't appear on the checkout page.

We've prepared a sample message you can add to your website as a start. You can also update your policies to include this information.

Account holders who forget their passwords

I’m unable to change your password for you, but after clicking the Sign In link on the homepage, you can click Forgot password? to send yourself a password reset email. This link expires after 24 hours.

Member Sites and customer accounts

When you enable and subscribe to Member Sites, we automatically enable customer accounts on your site. Visitors to your site can become members of your member sites by creating customer accounts and paying your membership fee (if applicable). From there, they'll log into their password-protected customer accounts to access the gated content they’ve purchased memberships to.

Learn more about how members create and sign into their customer accounts in How members access their customer account.

Disable customer accounts

To disable customer accounts:

1. Open the Selling panel and click Customer accounts.
2. Switch the toggle off.

If you manually added a sign in link, you should remove these links from your website after you disable customer accounts. Keep in mind that some links are reserved for internal parts of your website, so any manually-added sign in links that include “/account” in the URL will no longer work.

FAQ

Can visitors check out without an account?

Yes. Logging into an account at checkout is optional. Customers and donors without accounts on your site can check out as a guest.

Can I require visitors to create an account to check out?

No. It's not possible to make creating an account required.

Can account holders change their email address?

Yes. Account holders can change their email address when logged into their account. For complete steps and troubleshooting tips, visit How customers use customer accounts.

What happens when an account holder places an order or donation while logged out?

If an account holder enters the same email address at checkout, you'll find their order or donation with their contact information in the Contacts panel. When that person logs into their own account, however, orders or donations placed while logged out won’t be included in their order history.