Your iPart-based site is not just for self-service: On Behalf Of gives your staff a customer service mode, to complete website commerce on behalf of your customers. When requests for event registrations, product orders, and even membership renewal payments come in by phone, fax, or email, On Behalf Of lets you conduct a secure session during which you can add items to a customer's cart and complete the transaction for them, all without signing out of your own session.
Separate carts, for privacy
To avoid confusion and to protect your customers’ privacy as to which items they may have added to their own carts, On Behalf Of sessions create and save carts that are completely separate from those your customers see. For added security, items yet to be purchased are saved in these carts, but not any cardholder information that may have been entered.
For example, if you added a registration to a member’s cart but do not submit it, then she will not see the registration in her cart the next time she signs in; however, when you return to registering her on her behalf, you see her cart restored to the state it was in when you left it. Once you complete a purchase on her behalf, both she and you can see the order through her account page.
Tip: You can use the audit trails to track which logged-in user performed each action that affected an On Behalf Of transaction.
Who can act On Behalf Of?
To protect the security of contact data, users must be added to the security role SysAdmin or OnBehalfOf to perform actions on behalf of another contact (individual or organization). To give a staff member On Behalf Of privileges, go to System Setup > Security administration > Users, find and select a user, and in User Information click add role.
Changing and ending On Behalf Of
When you act on behalf of someone else, all of your commerce-related actions pertain to the target contact until you end the session in one of these ways:
■ Select a new target contact: click (change) next to the target contact.
■ Clear the selected contact: click the down arrow next to the target contact and select Clear.
■ Close the browser.
■ Sign out of iMIS.
Whose contact information do iParts show?
Acting on behalf of another contact controls the current cart, but it does not keep you from getting to information for other contacts. An iPart determines whose cart and information to show and update based on this logic:
■ If the link's URL specifies an ID (such as for search results), it shows information for that contact.
■ If not, it shows information for your On Behalf Of contact, if appropriate. (For example, the Query Menu iPart runs queries regardless of the target contact.)
■ Without On Behalf Of, it shows information for you, the logged-in user.
■ If no one is signed in, it shows limited information.
For example, you could be working on behalf of one contact when you need to use the Directory to look up an address for another. You can drill down on information from those searches with no effect on your on-behalf-of contact: the iParts pass the queried contact's ID on the URL to show you the information you need. Only when you take actions that add items to the cart is On Behalf Of enforced.
Tip: What never changes is the contact name link in the top navigation: it always shows information for you (the logged-in user).