Along with the catalog and checkout, customer-related functionality is central to Magento. The customer's My Account area allows control over addresses, orders, billing agreements, product wishlists, product reviews, newsletter subscriptions, and more. Customizing customer functionality often includes changes to the Sign In and Create an Account processes, as well as modifying existing, or adding new functionality under the My Account area.

Depending on the dynamics and intricacy of our functionality, JS components are often friendlier solutions than server-side PHTML templates. They allow us to engage the customer without necessarily reloading entire pages, thus improving the overall customer experience. As with any client to server-side communication, the question of passing and updating the data remains to be addressed. This is where we turn our focus to Magento's section mechanism.

Moving forward we are going to take a look at the following:

• Understanding the section mechanism
• Adding contact preferences to customer accounts
• Adding contact preferences to the checkout