Is a blocked customer really blocked?

Do you also have issues with customers that you’ve blocked in Business Central (BC), but somehow they can still place orders on your webshop?

In Business Central (BC), you can block a customer so that an order cannot be created. This option is often used when customers have too many overdue invoices.

We’ve come across the “blocked customer” functionality in BC during several integration projects. In a default Magento webshop, a customer cannot be blocked unless the customer is deleted. This in itself solves the issue where a blocked BC customer would still be able to place online orders. However, this creates a new problem because all order history will also be lost, which cannot be recovered should the account be reactivated again in the future.

Disabled Customer Extension

To solve this issue, we’ve developed an in-house Magento extension: Disabled Customer Extension. This will prevent a blocked customer from logging in to the Magento webshop and placing an order. The customer will get a notification that he cannot log in and needs to contact customer support.

The extension makes it possible to map the “blocked” status in BC to Magento in such a way that the customer can no longer place orders without actually removing their account. On top of that, you can also include credit limits based on the customer balance in BC.

If you want to know more about this functionality, don’t hesitate to contact us by clicking here.