It's rarely beneficial for two or more customers to share a user login. This article explains an important reason why it doesn't usually work out, and outlines some possible alternative ways to accomplish what you're looking for.

Put simply, shared logins are confusing

If you're reading this article, you may be thinking about setting up a "shared" login on your site for some of your users. That is, one user login that's intended to be used by more than one user. We've seen this attempted many times, for many different reasons, and here's our take on it:

We don't recommend it.

Here's why: in our experience, it invariably leads to confusion for the print buyers. That's because everything that's done in the account is visible to everybody that uses it. Unfortunately, history has shown that print buyers have difficulty understanding that their account shows not only what they've ordered, but also what everybody else using the login has ordered.

Where it really gets confusing is when two users place orders through the shared login at the same time. Imagine this scenario:

1. Carla Customer logs in to store101@bigbranchstore.com, an account she shares with the other people in her office.
2. Carla puts an order for 1000 business cards into the shopping cart.
3. While Carla's busy doing that, Paul Printbuyer logs in to the store101@bigbranchstore.com account and places an order for 100 posters into the shopping cart.
4. Now Carla's reviewing her order and sees her business cards — and 100 posters she didn't order!
5. Carla removes the posters from the shopping cart without considering that another user might be using the shared account.
6. Around that time, Paul is reviewing the shopping cart. Imagine his surprise when he sees that the posters he ordered are not in his shopping cart, but a bunch of business cards that he didn't order are!

This scenario seems to happen every time a shared login is attempted.

Some other options

So what's a printer to do? We've found that usually when a shared log in seems desirable, there's actually a different, user-friendly option available. Let's take a look at some examples.

Assigning Company (or Branch) Managers

Sometimes customers want to set up a shared login because they want to access all of the ordering history for their company (or branch). The user-friendly way to do that is to use the Administrative settings to assign a user as a manager for their company or branch. Doing that gives them access to all of the order history for their company or branch.

To set up a customer as a company or branch manager, click on the Admin tab in the Edit contact tools.

Using the Create Account link

Sometimes you're just trying to make it easier on the customer by not making them set up accounts for all of their contacts. One thing you can do that makes it really easy on your customers is to allow them to set up accounts as they're needed. That can be accomplished by sending them the Create Account link that's tailored specifically for their company (or branch). When using that link, users are pre-authorized to be added to the company or branch, and have access to all of their products upon creating their account. Easy!

To get the Create Account link, edit any Company or Branch in your Control Center and go to the Create Account Page. There, you'll see a link that you can send to your customer to distribute to his or employees as they see fit.

Assigning Companies and Branches to Reorder Form Library items

Sometimes printers think that they need to assign a product to all 50 people in a branch manually, and think it would just be easier to create a shared login and assign the products to that. But there's actually a shortcut: you can assign Reorder Form Library items to companies and branches instead of to individual accounts.

Here's an article that explains how to take advantage of that feature: How to use the custom form editor.

Do you still need to set up a shared login?

Perhaps your situation doesn't quite fit these scenarios, and it still looks like using a shared login could be the right solution? There's probably a customer-friendly (non-shared-login) way to solve that. Please contact our support team and let us help you find it.