In a B2C model, is it correct/ok to create User record for each end consumer?

Question

This is a B2C business and we are selling online service (no physical product). We want to manage user's subscription of our resources in Salesforce.

We've created site and pages in Salesforce and user can login with their FB or Twitter accounts. But after login shall we create User record for each consumer?

In SF, my understanding is User is used for staff of my company, not end consumers. Account record should be created for each end consumer (maybe enabling Person Account here).

But it looks like SF's social login integration is designed for connecting to User Object. So I am a little bit confused here.

Thanks for help!

Answer 1

By Salesforce's definition, the User object:

Represents a user in your organization.

Each user has a different License. You definitely do not want all of your customers using the Salesforce license type. It will get outrageously expensive and there is absolutely no need for them to have access to all of that data. What you really want is a Customer Portal with use of the Customer Portal License Types. These licenses are generally assigned to specific contacts on an Account. However, in the B2C model, Salesforce has something referred to as Person Accounts (as you hinted at above):

A person account is an individual consumer with whom you do business, such as a financial services client, an online shopper, or a vacation traveler. Person accounts are applicable to organizations that operate on a business-to-consumer model as opposed to a business-to-business model.

This essentially allows your Account object to act like a Contact in several different scenarios. One of those scenarios is enabling the Customer Portal for a specific Person Account. This will create a User record that is then associated to that Person Account. Portal Users act a bit differently than your standard user, but this will force your customers to log in through their own portal rather than attempting to log in through your actual Salesforce instance (which you never want to do). You can then configure the portal to allow the user to only be able to access their own specific data and their own specific subset of functionality.

NOTE: There are costs associated to all of this. These licenses for the Portal Users cost money. Get in contact with your Salesforce rep and work out how much all of this will cost before you make any decisions.

Answer 2

You do not want to create a user record for each of your customers. You want to use the customer portal. Depending on your requirements, budget, or interactions with your customer, you may consider several other alternatives. i.e. public website, authenticated users, ....

The right consultant will help you create the ideal solution. Salesforce is a great platform with many alternatives. There are many ways to create a solution.