Account management on your web site -- part one
When developing your web site, you need to consider carefully whether you want your visitors to create an account at your web site so you can provide personalized service for them. In this article, we don't discuss whether you should do it or not. Instead, we review all the online accounts you may have had to manage so at least you can sympathize with those users who don't want to create yet another account. You may be surprised to find out that you have more accounts than what you'd thought. :-)
1. Online accounts for money management
This section enumerates all the online accounts that are directly related to money management. Usually with these accounts you need to exercise much more caution for security.
1.1 Bank accounts (2+)
Many people use online banking because of its convenience. Usually you have at least two accounts. One account is for banks that have local branches so you can visit them in person when necessary. The other account is for banks that don't necessarily have local branches but you may get higher interests for your savings. They may also issue you debit cards with which you can withdraw money from ATMs. For these cards you need to remember their PINs as well.
1.2 Investment accounts (1-2)
If you work for a public company, they may offer you Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) that allows you to buy your company's stock at a discount, or give you stock options and stocks (mostly restricted stock units, or RSUs) to reward you for your superior performance. :-) Therefore even if you are not active investors in stock market (I doubt if there is anyone who is not), you still need a brokerage account to manage these stocks and stock options you own.
1.3 Retirement accounts (1-2)
Your company may offer 401(K) or similar employer-sponsored retirement program to match your contribution to your retirement fund and you may also have set up individual retirement accounts (IRAs) such as traditional or Roth IRAs. So you may end up having one or two accounts because the companies who manage your 401(K) and IRAs can be different or the same.
1.4 Credit card accounts (3-4)
You may have at least one credit card each for Visa, MasterCard and American Express to ensure that you can use at least one whenever credit card is accepted. They are usually issued by your local banks, American Express, Citigroup and etc. If you apply for credit cards issued by merchants or department stores that give you some discount such as Macy's, Dell and etc, you will have even more cards to manage. For each credit card you own, you also have PINs to remember in case you need to withdraw cash during emergencies. If you manage credit card payment online, then the number of your online accounts increases even more.
2. Other online accounts
This section describes those accounts that are not directly related to money management. Some of them such as your Web email accounts are usually used as the account names for some other online accounts or are used to recover your password, you will need to safeguard them with extra caution.
2.1 Web email accounts (3+)
You may have at least one account from each of the major Web mail providers, such as Yahoo! Mail, Google Mail and Windows Live Hotmail because they may provide some additional services such as instant messenging, blogging and etc that none of the providers alone can satisfy all your requirements.
If you are bilingual or multilingual users, you may also have some non-English email accounts that may provide better localization support.
As we have mentioned earlier, your email address is often used as account names on other web sites or is used for password recovery. In addition your email contains a lot of personal information, so you need to safeguard them carefully. Even if it is free and you can apply for a new one in case you lose your email account, the impact can be far reaching.
2.2 Merchant accounts (4+)
If you shop online regularly, you may have also created accounts on web sites that you shop from time to time. Amazon, Dell and a lot others are popular web sites. You may also have an Ebay/Paypal account that you can use to buy/sell stuff on eBay or send/receive payment from your friends. This is much more convenient that personal checks.
2.3 Cash rebate accounts (2+)
Web sites such as Fatwallet, ebates give you some cash back if you visit some merchants through them. Since it saves you some money without much hassle, you may have signed up for these accounts.
2.4 Travel related accounts (3+)
Even though you do not necessarily travel a lot, you may still end up creating multiple accounts when planning just one trip. For example, if you book your trip through travelocity, hotwire, priceline and etc, you will create one account with them. During this process, you may also sign up for the frequent flyer program of the airlines you use and similar programs offered by those car rental companies and hotels. Though it can be a hassle to create all these accounts, you will get some freebies such as free magazines or some other rewards for your efforts.
2.5 Career accounts (2+)
People change jobs from time to time. When applying for new jobs, you either submit your resume to those companies' web sites directly or through some job aggregation web sites such as Monster, Yahoo! Hotjobs and etc. The more you apply for, the more accounts you will have to create even though most of the time it is just used once. You may have also maintained your professional network through LinkedIn and etc because the truth is that if you can get referral from your friends or colleagues, the chance of landing a good job increases significantly.
2.6 Blogging accounts (1+)
Many people have personal blogs these days. Some even make a living with blogging. You may end up creating at least one from one of those web sites providing free blogging services such as blogger.com, livejournal.com, wordpress.com or through your own web hosting provider.
2.7 Other accounts
If you are active participants in some online discussion forums, you may have created some accounts to build up your reputation or rank because with higher rank or reputation you may obtain more privileges. It is probably yet another way to boost your ego. :-) You may also sign up facebook to maintain your contacts online.
Depending on your life style, you may have more or less accounts than the ones discussed above. We cannot describe here all the types of online accounts one can have. However no matter how many you have, it is clear that you have more accounts to manage than what you might have thought of. Managing them can cost you significant amount of time. We are sure you don't want to create an account for any web site which you may just stumble upon. By the same token, unless your web site provides very compelling content that requires user's engagement and personal information, probably you don't want your users to be baffled by another account creation process.