In Salesforce, accounts represent business entities, and contacts represent individuals associated with accounts. To represent a shopper in commerce transactions, you need elements of both objects.
Required Editions
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Order Management can represent shoppers in two ways.
- Standard Accounts and Contacts—A standard account and a contact together hold a shopper’s data. The account and contact function as separate records.
- Person Accounts and Contacts—A person account and a contact together hold a shopper’s data. A person account is a special Account record type that includes data found in contacts. When working with a person account, you can’t work directly with the contact in the Salesforce UI. Instead, you access contact data via special fields that exist only on a person account. With person accounts. you can work with a single record instead of a separate account and contact for each individual shopper.
Enabling person accounts in your org creates two default record types for the Account object: business account and person account. A business account is identical to a standard account. For an org with person accounts enabled, treat references to “standard account” in the documentation as a reference to “business account.”
Order Management always represents business buyers with standard accounts and contacts. By default, it also represents individual shoppers with standard accounts and contacts. To represent individual shoppers with person accounts instead, configure the permission set to access Account records. See Configure Access to the Console App.
You can’t disable a person account after you activate it. However, you can configure Order Management to use business accounts instead of person accounts for individuals by turning off the Person Accounts for Shoppers setting.