I had a phone call yesterday (got to love customers who call on lovely sunny Sunday afternoons – what’s worse was I was here working!) and someone wanted to buy a product but was having trouble with the checkout.  Now, I could have created the order manually and spent 10 mins on it or I could have used the account the customers account and saved all that time.  But there was the problem of the password – I just don’t feel right asking what peoples passwords are so I had a look around and found this little contribution…Master Password for OSCommerce.

What it allows you to do is go to the login screen, enter the customers email address and then instead of using the customers password, enter your master password. 

Installation is extremely easy – you need to run a mySQL command and change a line in a single file – that’s it.  One thing I had a problem with is that the mySQL had a configuration_id of 188 but that ID was already used by me which caused an error (nothing serious – phpmyadmin just said that the command couldn’t be executed) so I had to change that number to something unused and it worked a treat.

When I had access to the customers account, I then was able to take the customers payment manually via my payment processor – ProTX has an online terminal system – and then go through checkout but instead of saying that the payment method was credit card, say it was via cheque.  That way, I don’t have to enter the credit card details again and the order gets created in the system.

Just a security caution – if someone found out the master password then could get into any of your customer accounts.  While not the end of the world (they would have to know the password and the email address of your customers) it’s still a security problem (not that the person would have access to information like credit cards, of course).  One recommendation I would have is to use a secure password and to change it regularly.

Remember…BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!

Martin

Technorati Tags: oscommerce, master password, contribution