Commercial registration happens when one creates an account with a merchant or service provider (Figure 7.1). The first step is for the individual to go through a registration process possibly filling out forms. Once the company has accepted those and created a record in their systems the company issues a credential and/or number to the individual.

Relationship to Other Domains

Commercial registration happens before individuals are able to do commercial transactions. For some commercial registration processes, documents and proofs of claims from government registration processes are required. Data from commercial registration are actively sold to the data broker industry. Databases of customers are vulnerable to theft and use on the illicit market.

What Is the Explicit Process of Enrollment in Person?

Since the dawn of time, merchants have offered accounts so their customers can buy on credit and be more likely to make purchases. Account enrollment happened in small communities where the merchants knew their clientele and supported them being able to buy goods on credit. Merchants relied on community knowledge to know who was in the community. They typically maintained these records with pen and paper in log books, tracking what goods were sold on credit and how much individuals owed.

Merchants also tracked and rewarded the purchases of goods by regular customers. These were tracked on paper.

As people moved into cities, a new service arose to support retailers knowing to whom they should issue credit. They would check with credit-reporting agencies to know more about the credit worthiness of their customers. Today we call these agencies data brokers. Due to the PII involved, this industry has its own domain (see below).

Today, retailers enroll individuals in loyalty programs by issuing them cards that give them a unique identification number, often encoded in a bar code on the card. They also often enroll an individual's phone number and use this to link activity. When an individual at a point of sale is asked to assert a phone number to link their purchase activity together with their loyalty card account, the phone number ends up being an identifier and a factor of authentication (the fact they know their phone number and can recite it).