Within WebSphere Commerce, a member can be a user, a member group, or an organizational entity. A user can be either registered or non-registered. A registereduser has a unique identifier, a password, and is required to provide some profile data for registration purposes. Approval may be required for user registration. Registered users can be classified according to their profile type; that is, profile type B denotes a business user (or a B2B direct or value chain customer) and profile type of C denotes a retail user (or a consumer direct customer). It is recommended that business users belong to their appropriate organizational entity in the membership hierarchy instead of the Default Organization. This means that, when a business user registers the organizational entity that the user belongs to should be specified, otherwise WebSphere Commerce will default to using the Default Organization. WebSphere Commerce commands can create a registered user, and update profile information.
A non-registered user only has limited privileges within the site and does not possess a unique identifier or password, and does not have to provide profile data. A non-registered user does not perform any specific tasks or actions in a WebSphere Commerce site that requires unique identification. It is also possible that the design of the site requires a guest user to become a registered user before certain tasks can be performed, such as placing an order.
Moreover, a user may initially perform actions as a guest user, and as a result, certain resources are associated with the user. Subsequently, if the user registers or logs on as a business user, resources that are associated with the user when the user was a guest are by default transferred to the new identity as a business user. If those resources contradict what the user should do in the capacity of a business user, the site needs to be implemented such that any contradiction will be detected later on by other business processes. For example, a user may visit a site as a guest and place certain items into his shopping cart. Subsequently, the user may log on or register as a business user. The items added to the shopping cart while the user was a guest still belong to the user. If those items violate any business policy of his organization or those items are actually personal items that the user pay for personally, it is the responsibility of subsequent business processes to detect the situation and take appropriate actions (for instance, an order approval process may be in place to ensure all the items a business user purchase are for business use).