WebSphere Commerce Portal user classification

There are three main types of users in a WebSphere Commerce store: registered customers, guest customers, and generic users.

• A registered customer is a returning user to the system where the customer's profile has already been registered on the WebSphere Commerce system even before the system authenticates this user.
• A guest customer, however, is a temporary registered WebSphere Commerce user where the customer's profile is created at the time when an anonymous user adds an item to the WebSphere Commerce shopping cart. Details of the guest customer profile is entered as the customer completes the order. Guest customer accounts cannot be reused after the user's Web browser session has been terminated. A guest customer is a temporary WebSphere Commerce user account where its sole purpose is to help the system track the anonymous user's order.
• A generic user is an anonymous user where the system does not require any tracking of user-specific information.

This same user concept can also be reused for the WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Commerce integration. WebSphere Portal users are required to authenticate using the WebSphere Portal server. Once the user has been authenticated, WebSphere Portal issues an LTPA token to the HTTP session that the portal user can use for accessing all authenticated services in the portal Web site. The first time an authenticated user tries to access a WebSphere Commerce portlet, the WebSphere Commerce portlet performs a single sign on operation against WebSphere Commerce for this particular portal user, using the credential stored in the user's session. This single sign on WebSphere Commerce session is stored with the Portal user and is reused for future WebSphere Commerce requests until the given identity token, such as the LTPA token, expires.

When a customer adds an item to the shopping cart, although the master record of the shopping cart content is maintained in the WebSphere Commerce server, the customer's portlet session is assigned an identity token that can uniquely identify the user's current shopping cart and all its associated order related activities. The customer's session is therefore synonymously referred as the user's shopping cart. As a guest customer authenticates through the Portal interface, the customer's current session, with all its related order items, is transferred to its registered customer account. This process is known as cart migration. That is, cart migration converts the guest customer's shopping cart into the authenticated registered customer's current pending order. If the registered customer already has one or more pending orders before authentication occurs, those pending orders are not affected. Only the newly migrated shopping cart becomes the registered customer's current pending order.