Dwayne,
 

I would like to also add that when you are shipping a boxed product, which is likely most common, there should be NO address fields offered if the cart requires an account. The most common presentation would be a ShipTo area, and/or a button to "Edit My Account" that returns back to the checkout process. As you mentioned earlier I believe, presenting address fields OUTSIDE the ShipTo or Account area is extra data that is not needed and a customer does not really know if it is modifying their account or not.
 

This login should happen before the shipping calculation is done, and this way there is no risk at 4 different sets of data (DNN Account, Smith Account, Order ShipTo Data, Custom Entered Order Data given before login).
 

Also, on another note, about login timeouts, we fixed this on our site so we can stay logged in without having to reenter the data each time we come. It is a DNN setting we had to change.
 

See http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/B....

Steve

We elect not to store cardholder data... our business model does not require it.

My sense in all this would be to somehow keep the DNN account in sync with the Smith account automatically. Or not even have a Smith account, and have any extra data stored elsewhere.

The goal is to not confuse the customer. Now, when you Add to Cart, it presents Ship To fields, and this is what I think is confusing. This should not be there. But, a checkbox to "Ship to alternate address" could be there which then allows the Ship To fields to be available. A customer may ask "Why am I needing to enter this data when I have an account?"

So a login should ALWAYS preceed the display of ship to data (I do not have an account required to add to cart but we do have it to checkout). Another option would be to pre-populate the ship to fields with the current account data if this must stay the way it is, but have an option that says "Use Default Shipping Address" and another that says "Use Alternate Ship To address", and have it clearly toggle between the two. Most sites have a more visible way of doing this.

I know this needs some research. But I think it can be simplified to a degree. It should not be rushed, and disscussion on this is a good idea!

I guess requiring a login to simply add to a cart would solve some of this, but that is less user friendly in my opinion. I think it is much better to allow customers to visually see their cart before checking out/creating an account/logging in.
 

What would be good is a way to edit the account via Smith.MyAccount, so users do not even have to get to the DNN Account area which is not user friendly at all.

All of the settings are configurable in DNN using the AspNetSqlMembershipProvider and I believe SmithCart supports the functionality. DNN can lockout an account for a period of time, but you do need a custom extension (UCanUse/Interactivewebs) to lockout by IP address which SmithCart could not support.

The only problem with using an email address for an account name is that emails can and do change. There is no easy way for admins or users to deal with account name maintenance in DNN.

Accounts and passwords have always been a can of worms.