Letting your customers use part of your business
Some of what your business does is only interesting to one person: the customer it belongs to. Where their order got to. What they booked. The document you prepared for them. A page only paying members should see.
Signing a customer in is the first half of that, and has its own article — "How your customers sign in". This one is the second half: once they are signed in, what can they actually do?
Closed until it is deliberately opened
Everything your business can do is closed to your customers by default. Not "hidden" — closed. Until something is deliberately opened up, a customer cannot reach it, and cannot tell whether it exists at all.
How something gets opened depends on who built it:
- An app I build for you. Opening it to your customers is part of building it. Ask for an app your customers sign in to — "let them see their order status" — and I work out which parts they should use, and those are opened as it is built. You approve the build like any other, and that approval is the decision: nobody at ZenBusiness reviews it first. So ask me what your customers will and will not reach before you say yes.
- Anything ZenBusiness built — the apps you start with, and the rest of the product. Opening one of those to your customers is a change ZenBusiness reviews first, not something either of us can switch on mid-conversation. Ask, and I will tell you whether it is safe and what it would take.
Either way, your customers can only sign in once customer sign-in is turned on for your business — see "Customer sign-in isn't turned on yet".
What I will never open up
Some things are refused outright, and I will say so rather than quietly doing it:
- Anything that spends your money. If it can charge a card, buy ads or pay a bill, it is yours alone.
- Anything you cannot undo. Deleting, cancelling, sending something irreversible.
- Anything that needs your say-so. If a task normally stops and asks you to confirm, that confirmation is yours. A customer can never stand in for it.
Everything else is a conversation, and the answer depends on what it does with your data.
Which sites are allowed to talk to your business
Your customer area does not have to live on the website I build for you. Plenty of founders have a site they already like and want the customer part to sit inside it.
That works — with one rule. Only sites on your allowed list can talk to your business, and I turn away customers arriving from anywhere else. The site I built for you is on that list from the moment it goes up.
Adding another site you own works now — just ask, and I will read the address back and put it on once you confirm. Taking one off works the same way, and I can read you the whole list, marking the entries I keep for you automatically.
Take a site off when you stop using it: anything on the list can show your customers their own information, so it should hold your sites and nobody else's, and nothing expires on its own.
Stopping one customer
Sometimes someone should no longer have access — they cancelled, they charged back, they behaved badly. Suspending them shuts the door on signing in, and nothing else about their record changes, so it can be reversed just as quickly.
Suspending someone does not delete them or their history. Removing a customer entirely is a different ask, and I will walk you through what it means first.
Your customer list is here, and suspending is one of the decisions you make from it — see "Your customers, and who can sign in". What suspending means for the customer themselves is in "How your customers sign in".
What your customers see when something is refused
If a customer tries to reach something they should not, they get a plain "you can't do that" and nothing else — no clue about what your business can do, or whether the thing they asked for exists at all. A stranger poking at your business should learn nothing from poking.
The flip side: a refusal looks the same whatever caused it, so if a customer says something is not working, ask me. I can see the real reason so you do not have to guess.
What this is not
It is not a second login for you. You sign in the way you always have, and your own account is completely separate from your customers'.
It is not a way for two businesses to share customers. A customer belongs to your business and only ever sees your business, even if the same person is a customer of another business here too.