In order to successfully organize an online store you will need to cooperate with many people, each performing different roles. This becomes even more necessary in a growing businesses. Even when managing a small online store, in some point of your business experience you will need the help of a developer in maintaining the online environment. Furthermore, if the business is growing faster, you may need a customer support representative, data entry clerk, promoters, reporters, etc. Would it make sense that each of these users access your store back end with the same credentials as you?

In order to manage the activity of each different person in your store, it is recommended to use different accounts for each user in the back end of your site. In this way you can grant the required access to the appropriated people, protecting the confidential information in your store. In this tutorial, we will walk you through setting up new users in your OpenCart store and allowing them the necessary access to features in OpenCart system.

In order to create a new user with different accessing and modifying permissions to the system features, we need to follow these two steps:

Create a new User Group
Create the new User

Defining a Role

First, we need to log into the Admin Panel of OpenCart and navigate to Settings > Users > Users Group. From here, OpenCart allows you to create different User Groups, each with different access and modify permissions. By default, you will see listed two roles: Administrator and Demonstration. Administrator, has all the permissions granted, while Demonstration has none.

In order to add a new User Groups , click on the [+] button in the top right of the page. The following page will be open.

Give a proper name for the newly created user group. For instance you may create a Reporters User Group, granting full access permissions and restricted modify permissions to only the report features. The reporter will be able to create and analyze the reports of your store data for Sales, Products, Customers and Marketing. Once you’ve determined the adequate level of access for the User Group you are creating, simply click the Save button.

Creating the User

Now we will create a new User, belonging to the Reporters User Group. Navigate to your admin panel to System > Users > Users. In a default OpenCart installation you will see listed only one admin user, probably the one you are currently using to access your store back end. In order to add a new User, click on the add button [+] and you will see the following view.

As seen in the image above, for a user account, you can enter a Username, specify the User Group, enter First Name, Last Name, Email, Image and Password. The status of the given user can be enabled/disabled by any user belonging to a User Group with permissions to modify Users.Now your Reporter can access the store with his/her credentials, having the required permissions to perform his/her job.

Also, if you need to assign another user to the same role/user group, you do not have to go through the steps at the beginning of this tutorial, because the User Group is already created.You may add as many User Groups and Users belonging to a User Group as you want. In this way you have more control to the activity that happens in your store.

On the other side, by increasing the number of users controlling part of the store features becomes difficult to keep track of your back-end activities. To make this task easier in OpenCart we would recommend AdminMonitor, OpenCart extension allowing you to have full overview of who does what, where and when in your OpenCart store. Open the demo page to see the module in action.

Conclusions

It is often necessary to delegate and distribute the work to other people when you are running an online business. This means that more people will have access to your store back end. In order to keep track of the different users and grant them the adequate access to your store, it is good practice to create different User Roles and assign different Users to them. In OpenCart, this process is easily configurable, allowing you to have an unlimited number of User Groups(roles) and User Accounts.