Understanding OpenCart Customers and Customer Groups

Understanding your customers means finding the right way to approach them.

The difference between just knowing your customers and understanding them is quite notable. You should not think that gathering some basic personal information means you already know how to engage your audience.

Just to clarify, this article will not discuss how to understand your customer’s psychology in-depth, although this is a very important aspect of being a store owner. A topic for another time.

In this post, we will show you how OpenCart can help you know more about your customers by gathering information and grouping them. However, to understand them, you need to know how to use that information and keep expanding it.

In the Customers field, you will be able to store basic information about your OpenCart users. In Customer Groups, you will be able to categorize your customers in specific groups of your choice. For example - VIP Clients. Access the sections by clicking Customers > Customers or Customer Groups in the admin panel as shown below.

Customer Management in OpenCart

First, let’s get you acquainted with the Customers section and the way it works. You simply collect basic data about the customers that have signed into your web store.

Here we see the standard fields for the name, E-mail, IP and other customer data that your OpenCart store collects when a user creates and account.

If you are looking for a specific customer, this field helps you find them. Simply fill out the empty spaces and click Filter. A much faster way of finding a customer, instead of having to scroll through all of your users.

The cool thing about this section is that you can manually add a new customer. It also goes in reverse - you have the ability to delete a customer. This will remove all of the data and order history associated with that customer’s account.

Usually, all of this information is automatically generated when a user creates an account in your store. However, you might find yourself in a situation where you need to create an account for a customer manually.

Creating a Customer Account Manually

Here you see all of the fields that are required to complete an account registration.

To the top left, you will see a button labeled “Add Address.” This function allows you to add all of the physical customer addresses you need, and also delete the ones you don’t.

Let’s create an example customer to see all of the additional sections that appear in this page.

We see four new fields labeled History, Transactions, Reward Points, and IP Addresses. These sub-sections allow you to track and manage the activity logs generated by each of your customers.

Let’s take a look at each of them separately.

The History section lets you add comments as a history log regarding a specific customer.

Use the Transactions tab if you want to manually add a transaction to a customer’s account. Simply input a description and amount for the transaction for it to appear in the log.

Reward Points can be manually added to specific products. The points will be assigned to customers once they purchase that product. You can add reward points to customers and include the reason for that together with the amount of points.

To remove reward points from a customer, enter a negative number in the Amount field.

Since visitors can enter your OpenCart store from different IP addresses, this tab allows you to track this for each visit your customers make. The IP address indicates the location of the network that the customer uses to enter your website.

Managing OpenCart Customer Groups

And now, for the more interesting part - grouping your customers.

What is so important about this section? The fact that it can simplify your work with customers, letting you organize them better and segment them into different groups. Managing this aspect is fundamental because of several reasons:

Optimize Marketing

Your marketing campaigns are most effective when they are targeted well. By segmenting your customers, you will know which customers will be suitable for each of the campaigns you start.

For example, you can run a promotional campaign on certain products for high-profile customers who often make larger purchases. This will make them feel appreciated and help drive sales at the same time.

Make Customers Happy

When you reward customers for making purchases that are larger than usual, you increase the chance that they will be happy with your store. This kind of customers are more likely to recommend your store to a friend or family member, which means more qualified business for you.

Maximize Profits

Optimizing your profits requires distributing your resources properly. With time being a scarce resource for any store owner, customer groups make your OpenCart store management much simpler. Customer groups allow you to automate some of the work and easily reach a large number of customers at once.

Adding a New Customer Group

The section for creating a new customer group is fairly simple, with only a few fields to fill.

Choose a Group Name that will be instantly recognizable for you so you know what type of customers you have categorized, for example - “VIP”. After that, describe the customer group with something simple, such as “High-profile customers.” You can also segment your customers by all manner of criteria, such as gender, age, location, etc.

Check if you want to approve the new customers upon login. If the initial registration of a new customer is not approved, you can add them to a separate customer group that has this function enabled.

This message will appear if a non-approved customer attempts to log in:

Organize multiple customer groups by assigning a number to the sort order, which will arrange the groups for easier management.

Assigning Discounts to a Customer Group

Let’s see how we can add a discount on a product of our choice to a specific customer group. First, let’s head to Catalog > Products and select any product. Click on edit and you will open the Edit Product section, where you have to click on the Discount tab. It will lead you here:

As you see, you can choose the Customer Group that will receive a discount. You can set a given quantity of discounted products, priority, price and a certain period of time during which the discount will be available.

Conclusion

OpenCart is known for its usability and simplicity as an E-Commerce platform. As you see, managing your customers is not a difficult thing, and the standard installation provides you with enough functionality to get you started on building your audience and catering to their needs. We hope this has been helpful and wish you luck!