This is extremely disappointing. I have two clients that want to use Member Areas but it makes no sense if just anyone can make an account.
One of them is a fitness/martial arts training academy that already has a large membership of students and they want to have a private area for different types of students with a dedicated training calendar, store, and information reference area. For example splitting up the students between yoga and spin. One store would have yoga related items and the other would have spin/cycling related items. These stores would only be accessible to their members which would allow them to sell specific items at different pricing from their public facing store without creating discount codes that can be shared around.
The other is an ecommerce brand that does both B2C and B2B sales and they want to use it to manage their dealers and give them a separate store to order from. Dealer pricing on the member store and public pricing on the public store. They also don't want to use insecure discount codes.
Right now I have these setup to use a password protected area which is not ideal because there's no account tracking and having one password for everyone is not very secure. For the B2B company, they need to reset their password monthly and send out a dealer email to let people know. It's very inconvenient. Their other option would be to build a second website which they don't want to do.
A membership approval and/or an internal accounts option would solve all of this.
