Online payments and donations: benefits of e-commerce

e-Commerce: registration and login

The purpose of registration and login is usually to provide users with the convenience of a more streamlined return visit by, for example, storing information they would otherwise have to enter each time. Additionally, registration and login can provide a registered user with additional services or content. By obtaining user details through the registration process, your organisation can collect valuable data that will help you to better understand your customers, supporters or donors. Remember, whenever you are dealing with customer personal information to take privacy and security considerations into account.

Note that capturing user information for a one-off e-commerce transaction does not necessarily imply registration. However, businesses and organisations still need to understand the importance of handling private information in a responsible and secure fashion. It is generally considered best practice to make registration to complete an e-commerce transaction optional, that is, by declining registration your visitors choose to re-enter their data for every transaction.

Registration

Registration refers to the process in which users enter key details about themselves and receive usernames and passwords to allow them to log in. Registration information is stored by your website for use when users return to your site. As well as protecting the privacy of your users’ personal information you have a duty to securely protect their passwords.

Registration usually occurs with a user completing an online registration form, which usually contains both mandatory and optional fields (it is important to indicate on the form which are optional and which are mandatory). The specific details asked of a user during the registration process may depend on the nature of the transaction. For example, to receive newsletters and updates, providing a name and email address should be sufficient. However, if they are buying products via your site, details of their shipping address will also be necessary.

At a minimum, mandatory fields usually include:

• name
• username, nickname or a screen name
• email address
• password
• verify password

Often an email address is used as a username because it is easy for the visitor to remember, and this ensures that your organisation captures the visitors’ email address.

Optional fields can include:

• address
• phone numbers
• other information relevant to your offering.

Login

Login is the process whereby returning users enters their usernames and passwords to access the services or areas of the site available to registered users. The login information provided by each user is checked against the database and either confirmed or rejected.

It is often considered best practice to provide users with, at a minimum, the ability to:

• retrieve forgotten login information—this is usually done by sending an email to a user with temporary login information
• change their own passwords
• access, modify or delete their personal information stored in the system.

How to set up registration and login

You can talk to your web developer about how to set up a registration and login facility within your site.

If you are not using a website developer, it is possible to purchase pre-prepared scripts from software developers or resellers that provide basic registration and login functionality (a script is a chunk of computer code for a particular purpose that can be embedded in your website code).