OpenCart Community

I'd like to see a basic multi-user capability. The scenario is when 3 or 4 people at a customer's business wish to share a single OC account so that their shopping history is all in a single account vs 4 separate accounts.

This might be something as simple as implement a distribution list e.mail facility for use as the logon name, and having a list of real people e.mail addresses attached to the distie list. Users could easily add/remove who were on the distie list and any order would go to everyone on the list. maybe a check-box would be useful during checkout to say who actually placed the order, but that would be manually indicated by the user during checkout.

Sure, it means people sharing a logon name and password, and limited traceability which of the people who access the account placed the order, but its simple and effective.

if the stub for multi-user capability (ie everyone has a logon name = password which gave visibility to each others activity) could be created in the core functionality of v2, then more sophisticated extensions might get developed, but that's the icing on the cake.

Multi-user capability in OC is already built in, (a) in User Groups that can be populated and given appropriate settings while allowing users in one user group to have their own names, usernames, and passwords, and (b) in cc: mailing accomplished by an expedient comma in recipient lists. It is moreover augmented by various publically available extensions and privately executed customizations.

Doesn't that relate to multiple employees by the webstore ? eg used for order processing tasks.

I'm talking about multiple employees hired by a customer of the webstore, so that if Jon, George and Fred all work for "my town's photography" and they bought camera equipment, their employer "my town's photography" could see all the firms purchases in a single order history / manage reorders etc etc.

The same basic approach can be taken to user groups and to customer groups. To differing effect in what the people you have in mind can see and do, you can set up a user group or a customer group for them. For the sake of exploring that you would probably want to use two short suites of different names (maybe three) for two different testname outside employers.

Since doing that will affect the database itself (with harmless clutter), you should first make a database backup using phpMyAdmin / Export (doing that routinely will be helpful in the long run anyway).