Advanced Customer Management

[TabulaRasa]

Hi there,

I hope I'm putting this thread in the right location. This isn't really for a contribution that I've been able to find but maybe it does and someone can point it out to me but it's multi-part questions.

 

First I'll explain the scenario of what I need to set up. The store is viewable to anyone like a gallery but it doesn't show any pricing until the customer logs in. ONLY qualified (Wholesale) customers may aquire a log in and we have to approve them (currently we do all our business over the phone so it happens that way now). Once approved they can log in and see the prices and buy stuff.

 

Now I'm up against a couple things.

 

One, I already have a very long list of customers I'd like to pre-add so they are ready to go. So when we send out our printed catalog we can say in it "Log in to our site using your customer number as your user name and the PIN# Printed next to your address as your password." Once they log in it would be cool if they can then manage their account, change their password etc like normal. We know the catalogs are only going to qualified folks so there's no worry there.

 

Two, I need some way to restrict just anyone from making an account and seeing pricing. Now this could either be that somehow we completely remove the option of allowing the user to register their own account so that they would call us and say they want to set up an online account and we do it for them. Or what would be cool is to have something that allows them to register like normal but when they submit their info it tells them they must wait for approval and will get a phone call to confirm they are who they say they are. Kind of like the option on the PHP based message boards where you need to get an approval e-mail from the admin to "ok" your account and begin posting.

 

So really my questions are, do these things already exist and if not what are my chances of making something like this work for OSCommerce, I would need the help of someone more skilled in PHP than myself.

 

Thanks