The Customer API manages a customer's information, including their billing and shipping address information, contact information, order history, lifetime value, and more. It allows for customers to be grouped into sets to control the specific sites they can access using the same login credentials, as well as supports the B2B commerce feature that includes a hierarchy of customer accounts. For more information about customer management, see the B2C and B2B customers guides.
Some tips for using different resources of the Customer APIs:
- Use the B2B and Customer Accounts resources to manage the components of shopper accounts, including attributes, contact information, company notes, and groups associated with the customer account.
- Use the Address Validation resource to validate addresses associated with a customer account contact.
- Customer Attributes are custom attributes that you can apply to customer accounts to add further definition for special uses, such as marketing campaigns, or discounts. Refer to the Customer Attributes user guide for more information.
- Use the Customer Credits resource to manage the store credit associated with a customer account. Store credit can represent a static amount the customer can redeem at any of the tenant's sites, or a gift card registered for a customer account. At this time, gift card functionality is reserved for future use.
- Use the Customer Segments resource to manage groups of customers and target discounts for these segments. After a customer segment is defined, you can associate any number of customer accounts with it. Meanwhile, the Customer Sets resource controls the specific sites your customers can access using the same login credentials, as well as what My Account storefront customer information is shared between sites.
- Use the Visits resource to manage all visits a customer makes to a tenant's sites and measure the level of transactions a customer performs during a unique visit for customer account analytics. Track customer visits by site (including online and in-person interactions), the transactions a customer performs during the visit, and the device type associated with the visit, if any.
- Use the Customer In-Stock Notification Subscription resource to manage the subscriptions customer accounts use to send product notifications. This resource can send a notification when a product in a catalog returns to a site's active inventory after it is out of stock, or when a new product becomes available for the first time. (Not supported for bundled products.)
- Use the Storefront Auth Ticket resource to generate and refresh authentication tickets for customer accounts.