Customer Authorization Status - Not Working?

Hi,
On my website customer authorisation status is set to authorised automatically so all new customers can order straight away if they wish however on some occassions I would like to stop someone from ordering or make them pending approval until they contact me however so matter what setting I put this on all customers can still order. This means in some cases we have to cancel an order and issue refunds etc whereas stopping someone from being able to order or checking with us for confirmation first would work much better. Any ideas whats gone wrong as others say this setting works fine for them.
Thanks

What are your settings?

Hi - not sure if this is what you mean, if not please let me know which info you need. Someone else normally sets all this stuff up but they been fobbing me off with 'it wont work' for months and that if it did work then we would need to activate each new customer so they could order - not sure how true that is but would not be practical as we not around 24/7 so would need default one to stay as authorised/can order etc

Customer Approval Status - Authorization Pending 0
Customer Authorization: filename customers_authorization
Customer Authorization: Hide Header false
Customer Authorization: Hide Column Left false
Customer Authorization: Hide Column Right false
Customer Authorization: Hide Footer false
Customer Authorization: Hide Prices false

Thanks

Customer Authorization is designed to either be required for a manual authorization after the account is made or not used at all, meaning everyone can create an account an buy immediately ...

To make it where Customer Authorization can be denied after the account is made, you would need to change the code for how this is managed ...

What you would have to do is set the Authorization to be ON when an account is created ...

But, you would need to customize the code to set everyone to be "automatically" approved rather than "manually" approved when the account is created ...

This would then let you turn off someone's authorization later ... or turn it back on ... but all new accounts would be able to be created, automatically authorized and then the customer can immediately buy and complete their order without you first needing to authorize them manually ...

Thanks - is it a tricky thing to change the code? (Mr B always says no to things until I prove it can be done without too much hassle lol).

If this is hard to do is there another way to limit a user's ability to purchase from the website? Its very very rare we get someone we dont want to sell to and we know we can block an ip in extreme case but if they are from an ip range e.g. university theres no way to stop them placing an order - if we delete account they can create a new one and if we change password etc they can request a copy (all without us knowing until the order arrives) - we then have to cancel and refund etc. Again as I said its very very rare we would need to do this but one customer in particular wont stop trying to order to a country we wont ship too (have removed the country from shipping and customer account so they keep creating orders with their overseas address and UK as the country). Figured the authorisation option would stop this from happening and I would prefer to use that, but if theres another way to limit a user from purchasing please let me know.

If you look where the create account happens, you just need to add on to the INSERT that the customers_authorization is set to 1 ...

A search in the Tools ... Developers Tool Kit ... in the bottom input box for the field:
customers_authorization

should help you locate the file you need to customize to have New Customers have the customers_authorization set to 1 vs the current logic based on the setting ...

Ajeh,

Is this where we need to change the code?

/public_html/includes/modules/custom folder/create_account.php

Line #69 : $customers_authorization = CUSTOMERS_APPROVAL_AUTHORIZATION;

Line #309 : 'customers_authorization' => (int)CUSTOMERS_APPROVAL_AUTHORIZATION

Line #384 : $_SESSION['customers_authorization'] = $customers_authorization;

Thanks

Only change these:
CUSTOMERS_APPROVAL_AUTHORIZATION

to the new value that you want new accounts to be set to ...

By default, these values are set to force the customer to wait on manual approval when the account is created ...

You are wanting the account to be pre-approved, so that you can use the Customer Authorization as a means to disable an account ...

Be aware, this is only so valuable as the customer could make a new account with a new email address to try to skirt the issue ...

Hi Ajeh,

I have been doing the update for beeunique and setting the values you have suggested to 0 did what i wanted for a new customer.

However we noticed that a guest is asked to login to the shop where the add to cart button normally is with the customer approval status set to on in admin ie value 3 so that as suggested if we switch off customer authorization for someone they can browse but not go to the shopping cart. Please help us setup the guest so they can browse as per normal add to cart and then create account.

As per the customer been able to create a new account to get over this problem yes this is a possibility however they would need to go to the trouble of using another email address and besides the people nickki is wanting to do this to is very small but useful to her none the less.

Thanks for your help so far you have been most helpful.

regards
Martyn
https://www.beeunique.co.uk

I come to your site ... make an account ... I am automatically approved for shopping ...

Two days later, you take away my ability to shop ...

Three days later, I come along and want to add things to my cart to checkout ...

If I login ... I know immediately I cannot buy anything ...

If a guest comes along, I see immediately that I can browse but need to create an account to buy ...

There is no way to distinguish the guest from the person marked as not allowed to shop until they login ... so, when Authorization is turned on, you have the choice of people can see or not see the shop and see with or without prices ...

You would have to do a lot more work and customization to toss the guy on his ear after he has already been shopping for an hour putting things in the cart only to login and find out he is not allowed to buy anything ...

Mainly you tick off the customer doing this ...

The other way, you give everyone a chance to see things ... maybe tease them into making an account so they can see prices ... and the looser will login and see his account is not approved ...

No sorry I think you misunderstand - we are happy to let everyone shop and buy as normal and would like everyone to be able to view prices etc on website and if they are happy then to create an account and purchase the items as normal - we would never simply block a person from buying or viewing the website.
But..
Sometimes we get a customer who takes up hours of our time over a £6 order - the kind of customer that you can never please - one customer in particular sends such abusive swearing messages at our staff - real nasty stuff because her 1st class order was not received the next day (one email had no less than 20 profanities, and shocked me even though i'm no prude)- we refunded to basically get rid of her and to this date we still get the occassional message from her and she has tried to order twice since this (both orders cancelled and refunded which caused even more abusive messages) - she is from an ip range so we cant block her, deleteing account means she can recreate it and changing password means she can request new one automatically. We also have the guy who lives in South Africa but continually creates an account and puts his address country as UK (along with his S/Africa address) - again we cant block ip only in this case (also IP not showing as S/Africa so something very weird with this order/account). We would ONLY like the option to block the occassional customer who causes so much hassle its not worth the order (sounds harsh I know but I am talking extreme cases like those above here). So we felt it better to change authorisation for this occassional person to view but not browse and we would of course inform them beforehand that we were closing their account and they would no longer be able to shop on the website - we would not just close and not say anything and again it would only be for someone we had previously asked not to do something or had explained something to them many many times. They could create a new account but our accounts package should alert us if the name/address account is blocked. By and large the vast majority of the customers are great and give us praise which is good to hear, however a small percentage will always be unhappy over one thing or another and we do work hard with them to ensure they get the service/items etc they expected and wanted, however some people (thankfully only 1 in 10,000 it seems) do seem to enjoy making life hard for others and when my staff receive really nasty letters from a customer we would like someway to stop these customers ordering (we would then either ignore or send a standard reply to any emails received).

Again we ALWAYS try to sort out any problem the customer has, even if its down to then misreading something or royal mail problem etc we always work hard and do whatever we can but sometimes you know that no matter what you do the customer does not want to be pleased and you know that any future order will be the same - switching their account to 'cannot purchase' and letting them know this should at least in theory stop them ordering (any new accounts created under same address etc would be alerted by our accounts package and also closed) - I know its not fool-proof and if there is another way to stop these rare unwated orders then we can do that, but just now these few people are taking up so much time in checking addresses, processing refunds, replying to numerous emails etc - any other solution would be greatfully appreciated :)

You would need the Authorization re-written to allow:

Guests to be treated as Authorized Customers until they login/create account ... where the create account would automatically Authorize then and the Login would use the current setting to keep them Authorized or ... de-authorize them so that they cannot complete the order ...

This is not a simple change, however it can be done ...

But without going through all of the code and customizing everything to handle things this way, I really cannot tell you just how many files to change or modify to allow the jobs to work in this manner ...

I have some ideas on what approach I would take, but again, I would have to re-write the code and test everything to put it all together ...

Have pm'd you