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Accounts in Commerce Engine represent your customers, and contain all the data necessary to provide them services, communicate with them, and bill them for subscriptions and one-time purchases. The Account holds the customer’s payment methods available for creating subscriptions. Use Commerce Engine Portal or API to create, edit, or manage your Commerce Engine customer accounts. The account can be linked to your Customer Relationship Management system using the Account ID. If you maintain customer information in both Commerce Engine and your own database, be sure to coordinate updates made in Commerce Engine with your internal records to ensure they remain synchronous. For guidance how to search for accounts, see Filtering Accounts.

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Child accounts

Commerce Engine supports a two-level account hierarchy letting you establish parent and child accounts. This is to allow customers to create a family unit by enabling related parent-child accounts. In this way, child accounts can subscribe and be entitled to purchased products while using the parent account payment method. The following logic is supported:
  • A parent account can have multiple child accounts but a child account can have only one parent. A child account can not be a parent to another account.
  • A parent account can pay for its own subscriptions and transactions, and for any of its children’s subscriptions and transactions.
  • A child account can only be linked to one parent account therefore parents must indicate whether they want to replace an existing parent link.
  • A child account can have a payment method that differs from the parent account, and can use either its own payment methods or the Parent’s payment method to pay for subscriptions.
  • When two accounts are linked or unlinked (as parent and child), an email is sent to both.
For more details, refer to Add Child to the Account Parent topic:Billing