I am trying to create a website for multiple stores to manage their customer accounts. I am getting stumped on how to handle the situation where the store creates an account for a customer before the customer has created any login credentials.

The store would have to be able to create a "Customer" and then later associate that "Customer" to a particular set of login credentials.

I was thinking I the store could send an "Invite" email to the customer with a link to the "Create Login" page that has the customerID as parameter. When the login is created, the supplied CustomerID value is placed in the customers profile. It seems like I would lose a lot of the built in functionality of the profile features though since i would have to create a "Customers" table with all the pertinent customer info...

Does anybody have any ideas on how to better handle this situation?

If this has been covered in another thread, can somebody provide a link?

I've had to handle a similar situation in the past. It was a situation where a client wanted to transfer their existing paper records to a database. The issue was, the system was brand new, so obviously no existing customers had ever created logins.

What we did was to actually create logins for these existing customers on our end. When an existing customer was added to the DB by an administrator, the system would automatically generate a random password for them (you can easily set up the profile to do this). Then the customer would be sent their "temporary" credentials and a link to the login page.

We wrote a little module that would determine if this was the first time they had ever logged in. If it was, they were required to change their password right then and there.

I had thought about that, but wasn't too sure how i felt about the users not creating their own UserNames. It might not be too big a deal though...

Any other ideas out there?

I had a similar situation years ago where we generated estimates for prospects that were not yet customers. I would enter a temporary customer with a "." in front of the prospect's name, then if the prospect became a customer later on we would transfer all the estimates to the customer account, and delete the temporary account.

This method would require that you monitor new customer accounts, and then transfer the documents from the temporary account to the customer's official account.

The "." prefix also provided grouping of the temporary names in lists and reports for easy identification. It was a simple and rather effective solution.

As I recall, we made the system so that they had to use their email address as their username. (We had the email addresses already.) A lot of systems do that (Amazon and Google, for a couple of examples). The added benefit is that they aren't as likely to forget it.

It takes a little more work, because under the default Membership provider, user names are supposed to be permanent. But, it's not too hard to implement a custom provider that makes the username easily changeable.