Most of the WCS developers are confused with the member subsystem and different types of users in WCS. Here is a small post on the different types of WCS users and their differences.

The member subsystem of WCS handles the users of a WebSphere Commerce site (Member subsystem also covers the organizations, member groups, roles and access control policies). Users of a WCS site are the business users or administrators that manage the store or end users who access the site for shopping.

A WebSphere Commerce site can have three types of users. Generic, Guest and Registered users. All the users of any WCS installation fall under any of these categories including business users and store administrators.

A generic user is a user who just accessed the site. Any user accesses a WCS website will have a userId associated. All the generic users share the same userId and for a default WCS installation the generic userId will be -2001 (At least in my case). The generic user does not have any user information.

When a generic user adds an item to the shopping cart, he/she becomes a guest user. All the guest users will have a unique userId associated. This guest user can have personal information stored in the database as they are having a unique userId. This userId is extremely important and is used for tracking their shopping cart.

A registered user is any user who signs up in a WCS system. They will have a username and password for logging into the application. They can have a permanent address in the system. Even the site/store administrators and business uses comes under this category. Any user can become a registered user by signing up or signing in to the system.

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