What's new · Summer 2026

Summer 2026: customer accounts arrive on your store

Until now, a visitor paid, then vanished. This summer, your store learns to keep them: customer accounts are here. Your buyers sign up, track their orders and earn loyalty points, and you steer it all from two new pages, Members and Loyalty.

The Harvesters, 1565Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Flemish, c. 1525-1569)

At a glance

• Customer accounts: your visitors sign up and get their own personal space.
  • Loyalty program: your customers earn points on every order and redeem them for discounts.
  • Prefilled checkout: saved addresses and cards offered right at payment.
  • Downloads: your customers retrieve their purchased files from their space, securely.
  • Members page: every account on your store in one place, with a detailed profile, tags and internal notes.
  • Account required or guest checkout: you decide whether buying needs an account.
  • Google sign-in and reCAPTCHA protection, on top of email sign-in.
• Abandoned-cart recovery: an automatic email reminder to customers who didn't finish their order.
• Online withdrawal: a ready-made form that brings your store into compliance with the new European obligation.
• Page templates: a gallery of 90 ready-made templates, sorted by activity, with a preview before you pick.
• Artworks: a public-domain image library in the editor, provided by the Art Institute of Chicago.
• Lighter pages: your published pages load 30 to 50% less data.
• MCP connector (in private beta): connect an AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT to your store to manage your catalog by conversation.

Customer accounts

Customer accounts were one of your most requested features. They're built to turn buyers into loyal customers rather than one-time visitors who pay and leave: each customer now gets a personal space tied to their purchases, which they view and update themselves.

Business or Confort plan required

Customer accounts and everything built on them — the loyalty program, prefilled checkout, downloads and abandoned-cart recovery — are part of the Business and Confort plans. To use them, switch to one of these plans from Manage my plan.

Your customers' personal space

Once signed in, your customer finds their orders and their status, their active subscriptions, their shipping addresses, their cards saved with our payment provider, their favorites, their files to download and their points balance, all in one place. They manage their details and addresses without going through you, and choose whether to receive your communications.

INFO

When a customer creates their account with the same email they used for earlier orders, those orders are automatically linked to it. They find their full history from sign-up, including orders placed before customer accounts existed.

With or without a store

On a store, the account links the customer to their purchases and saves them from asking you about every detail.

Without a store, accounts gate access: you publish a page or article only signed-in members can see, for example a professional area or subscriber resources. Visitors who aren't signed in are invited to create an account before entering.

Reward loyalty

A personal space makes customers want to come back; a points program gives them the reason. The Loyalty program page defines a program that applies automatically to all your members. There is nothing to set account by account: a single program runs at a time.

A badge at the top of the page shows its state, Active or Inactive. While it stays Inactive, your customers see nothing and earn no points, giving you time to set everything up calmly. You turn the program on with Enable loyalty, then open the member area from Settings: loyalty only becomes Active once both are on. Disable loyalty suspends the program without touching points already earned.

You decide how many points each spending bracket earns, which amount the calculation applies to (with or without shipping), and you can add a Welcome bonus at sign-up as well as a Birthday bonus every year. On the redemption side, Add a tier creates as many points-for-discount conversions as you want; at payment, the customer picks the one that suits them.

The Member preview, shown next to the form, displays in real time what a customer will see. The Earning simulator rounds out that preview: enter an order amount to check at a glance the points it would earn with your settings. The page also generates a draft of the program's terms of use, built from your company information.

Faster checkout

The account is felt most at payment.

For a signed-in customer, checkout automatically reuses their shipping addresses and saved cards. They complete their order in a few clicks, without re-entering what they already filled in.

From the Settings page, you choose whether a visitor can pay without an account or has to create one:

• Allow guest checkout removes the most friction before payment. It's the default.
• Require an account ties every order to a member, who then finds their history and points balance, and guarantees every buyer is enrolled in your program.

Guest checkout favors a simple buying path, requiring an account favors a lasting relationship with the customer.

Manage your members

On your side, in the dashboard, you keep an eye on all of them. The new Members page gathers every account created on your site. Search for a customer by name, email or tag, and filter confirmed accounts (Verified) from those still awaiting validation (Pending).

Each profile brings together the member's contact details, their tags, their points balance and the history of their orders, subscriptions, addresses and cards. You can confirm an email address on the customer's behalf, credit or debit points with Adjust points for a goodwill gesture, leave an Internal note visible only to your team, or end all of an account's active sessions with Sign out all sessions.

Most members sign up on their own, but the Add a member button lets you enter one by hand, for example after a sale closed offline.

Sign-in and security

Once the member area is open, your customers sign in with an email and password, no extra setup. Passwords are never kept in plain text. The emails sent to your customers (sign-up confirmation, password reset) carry your store's identity, not Vivlab's.

Two options extend this sign-in when you need them, both set from the Settings page:

• Google sign-in adds a Continue with Google button to your sign-in and sign-up forms, for customers who'd rather not create a password.
• reCAPTCHA checks in the background that the person signing up is human, with no checkbox or image to identify.

Recover abandoned carts

An account is also a customer you can reach again, and so a sale you can save. When a customer fills their cart without reaching payment, you now find them on the new Abandoned carts page. Each row shows the customer, the number of items and the amount left behind; open it to see what they meant to buy and, if needed, adjust your offer.

Vivlab can also send those customers an email reminder. You enable this recovery and set its delay from the member area Settings: once that delay passes without payment, the customer gets a message inviting them to finish their order. Only signed-in members who agreed to these reminders are contacted; a visitor without an account never is, having given no consent.

Business or Confort plan required

Like customer accounts, abandoned-cart recovery is part of the Business and Confort plans.

Files to download, safely

Accounts don't only build loyalty: they also deliver your digital products. When a customer buys a file, it is now tied to their account. They find it whenever they want in My downloads, from their personal space, without digging through an old order email. Files stay on private storage: they only open through a temporary link, generated for that customer the moment they download.

Withdrawal, kept compliant

Since 19 June 2026, European rules require online stores to offer a simple way to exercise the right of withdrawal. Vivlab handles it for you: the new Withdrawal section opens an online form where your customers request to withdraw from an order, with no development on your part.

Once the function is on, the customer finds their order with its number and email, then selects the items concerned. Each request reaches you by email and appears on the matching order. A customer signed in to their account follows their request's progress and retrieves their receipt once the refund is issued.

You keep control of the rules: set how long a request stays valid (at least 14 days, the legal minimum) and spell out your return conditions, which show up directly on the form.

Pick a ready-made page

Your customers now have their space; your site, in turn, comes together faster. Creating a page, started from the Pages list, now opens on a gallery of complete templates. Start from a template offers 90 designer-made pages you can filter by activity (food and dining, commerce, health and wellness, portfolio, real estate, and more). Before you commit, a template's preview shows its sections, colors and typography. Use this template takes it as is, ready to customize. You can still describe your page to the AI or begin from a Blank page.

An artwork library

To illustrate those pages, the editor opens a new image source. Next to Pexels, the image picker gains an Artworks tab: search by artist, theme or keyword ("Van Gogh", "Monet", "landscape") across thousands of works provided by the Art Institute of Chicago, then drop them straight into your page. These images are in the public domain and free to use.

Lighter pages

Once online, your pages also weigh less than before: depending on the page, 30 to 50% less data to load. Your site shows up faster for your visitors, especially on mobile and slower connections, which also helps your SEO. Nothing to set on your side, the reduction applies automatically to every page.

MCP connector Private beta

The last new feature looks ahead: for anyone who wants to hand tasks to an AI, Vivlab opens an MCP connector (Model Context Protocol). It connects a compatible assistant, such as Claude, ChatGPT or Mistral, straight to your store: from a simple conversation, the assistant finds a product, writes a description, creates a discount code, adjusts a shipping rate or checks on your orders.

Your password is never shared. The assistant goes through an authorization you grant from Vivlab and revoke whenever you want, and you choose whether it can only read your data or change it.

INFO

The MCP connector is in private beta: it's open to a limited number of stores for now. To get access, request it through a Support request.

Going further

This page isn't meant to cover everything. To understand how it all works, start with Customer accounts, then open Members for day-to-day management and Loyalty program to launch your rewards program. To recover the sales slipping away, the Abandoned carts page explains how to set up reminders. If you have a specific question, open a Support request and we'll get back to you quickly.