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Each of your customers is represented in Commerce Engine as an account. Accounts contain all the data necessary to provide services, support communication, and charge for one-time purchases or recurring subscription purchases. Commerce Engine stores each customer’s name, contact information, address, purchase history, and tax status. You can augment that data for personalized information using custom data fields within Commerce Engine. For instance, you could add customer specific information such as birthdays to the account data if that information is relevant to your business or customer relations. It is recommended to save the customer’s address as part of the account if taxes need to be calculated or other external verifications are required. Customer information is typically provided through the Commerce Engine API interface. Commerce Engine Portal provides an easy-to-use interface available to your team to fulfill customer requests, supporting high levels of customer satisfaction. Your team can issue refunds, modify payment information, cancel services, and more while viewing customer transactions, subscriptions and account details. Keeping with Amdocs’ PCI compliance, payment details are masked and will not be fully available to your staff.

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Child Accounts

Commerce Engine supports family units by enabling parent and children accounts. Child accounts can subscribe and receive entitlements for purchased products while using the parent account payment method. The following hierarchy 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 child’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.

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Payment Methods

The account owns all the payment methods that can be used for one-time purchases or subscriptions. Commerce Engine allows to add payment methods, update payment methods, and replace payment methods for specific or all existing subscriptions. Multiple payment methods can be stored per account. A new subscription can use the default payment method or one of the other payment methods on-file. For more details, refer to the Commerce Engine Payment Methods topic.

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Customer Information Integration

You can integrate Commerce Engine with third-party Identity Management and CRM solutions (using the account ID) to enable data sync between them. If you do not use a CRM solution, Commerce Engine enables you to log customer interactions to the Commerce Engine account including activities such as emails sent, phone calls received, and other communication with the customer. 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.