coping with telephone orders

Hi

Having produced my first eCart design - which I'm very pleased with - my client now informs me that all the duff email addresses in his old database were actually telephone orders placed manually.

This obviously causes problems with the new database, as the unique email address is the username and is a required field.

Anybody got any suggestions on how I can modify the existing setup, but enable the client to take orders over the phone? I'm guessing new 'phone-orders', 'order-method' (phone/online) table and fields - but if anybody's encountered this problem before, I'd love to learn from their experiences!

Cheers
Chris

The phone orders page should be a separate page from the main orders page that the public uses,

it should allow you to look up the email address to se if it already exists, then precess the order for that account.

if it doesn't exist, process the order for a new account

Thanks Jason

But the users table requires an email address (plus a unique value), so should I have a similar 'phone-users' table? Or should the order be processed without a UserID, with all the address fields, customer name etc being taken from the 'orders' table?

Thanks
Chris

for a phone order, the user may not have an account, so you will need to be able to create one for them

once the account is created, you can use the email address to look up the user account and use that to populate the address.

Thanks Jason

Sorry for the delay in replying. However, your solution will not work - if the user doesn't have an email address, they can't be entered as a new user, because the email address is a required field (and is the username).

Sorry - am I missing something obvious?
Cheers
Chris

you could create a dummy user that is used for phone orders when the purchaser does not have an email address.

thanks - simple, when you know the answer!
Cheers
Chris