New Release: B2B Account Management Enhancements

Following the recent blog for the release of Account Management for Elastic Path Commerce Cloud, we've now added support so you can start managing your accounts within Commerce Manager, the ability to allow account members to login via a username and password, and support for Addresses for an account.

Commerce Manager Support

We first released Account Management via our beta APIs, this most recent release brings the following capabilities into Commerce Manager, our business-user tooling, for Seller Admins:

• Ability to create, view, and edit accounts
• Ability to view members of the account added via the api
• Ability to view orders of the account
• Ability to create, view, and edit addresses for the account

The above capabilities now enable you to set up accounts from Commerce Manager which can be leveraged in your storefront and other touchpoints.

Consider a B2B hardware manufacturer (Seller) and a big-box retailer (Buyer). The hardware manufacturer can now manage accounts in Commerce Manager creating an account for the big-box retailer, additionally an address can be added for use in the checkout process.

The seller can now add account members John and Jane to the account created, via the api. After John and Jane create orders for their account, the seller can view the order details for both John and Jane from within Commerce Manager.

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Username and Password APIs

We've also added the support for account members to log in via username and password in addition to the previous login using OpenID Connect. The new capabilities include:

• Ability to create, view, and edit password profiles for an authentication realm
• Ability to create, view, and edit user authentication info to an authentication realm
• Ability to add, view, and edit password profiles for a user
• Ability to add, view, and edit OpenID Connect profiles for a user

With these new capabilities, you can now enable account members to authenticate via username and password. This allows you to get started with Account Management without setting up an OpenID Connect Provider for authentication, making it easier to start using Account Management and saving some time in your busy day.

For a more detailed guide on how to do this check out our How-To guide for Adding Accounts and Account Members.

What's Next?

We will be continuing to add features incrementally and release them frequently. You can soon expect to be able to add account members from within Commerce Manager. We'll also be adding Events and Webhooks support for Account Management APIs.

As new features are released, they will be added to the Elastic Path Commerce Cloud changelog, so, make sure to keep an eye out for that!

Getting Started

With these new Account Management capabilities B2B brands and buyers can more effectively manage their transactions. Use the postman collection to try out these new APIs. Additional details on these features are available in the documentation for both Commerce Manager and APIs.

Beta API Reminder

The APIs in this release are labelled Beta. These APIs provide early access into the Account Management functionality and enable Elastic Path customers to provide feedback earlier in the development process, before the APIs are finalized. Customer feedback is important to us, as it helps us better understand functional requirements and address problems early.