Customers
Everyone who buys from your store is a customer: a person or a business, with an account on your site or as a guest. Use this page to find a customer, see how they're addressed, and keep their details up to date.
| Menu | Commerce > Customers |
| Permission | View customers to look, Manage customers to add, edit, export and erase; Manage own customer profile and addresses for My Account |
| Feature | Customers |
What you see depends on your role. If the menu, a button or a setting on this page is missing, ask your administrator to give you the permission listed above or to turn on the feature. Only administrators can turn features on and change site settings.
Customers and accounts
A customer's sign-in, password and email stay on their account, which is managed under Security > Users like any other user. The customer record keeps what your store needs on top of that: how to address them, their company and tax id, and whether they want news and offers.
A customer who signs in and places an order becomes a customer the first time they order. Their customer record starts with their user name and the account's email.
Someone who buys as a guest becomes a guest customer with the name, email, phone and billing address they gave at checkout. Each guest checkout makes its own guest customer: an email typed at checkout proves nothing, so it never joins someone else's record.
Guests who create an account
When someone who bought as a guest creates an account with the same email, or signs in to one they already have, their guest purchases join the account, but only once the account's email is confirmed. An email typed at checkout proves nothing, so nobody can claim someone else's orders by typing their email.
When that happens:
- the guest's orders and Pay Later balances move to the account, and appear under My Orders and My Transactions;
- their addresses join the account's address book, without repeating one already there;
- the guest customer is marked Merged, links to the account's customer, and can no longer be edited. The account's customer lists the guest checkouts merged into it.
Find a customer
- Open Commerce > Customers. The most recently active customers come first.
- Type the start of a name, company or email in the search box and press Enter.
- Use the list beside the count to show only customers With an account, Guests, Businesses, Disabled ones, or All customers.
Each customer shows their email and when they were last active, with badges for guests, businesses and disabled customers.
Add a customer
For a customer you deal with outside the site, for example someone who orders by phone:
- Open Commerce > Customers and click Add customer.
- Fill in their details (below). Enter at least a name, a company or an email, so you can find them again.
- Click Save.
Edit a customer
Click a customer to open them, change their details, and click Save.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Kind | Person or Business. A business shows Company and Tax id. |
| Status | Active, or Disabled when you stop doing business with them. A disabled customer keeps their orders and history. |
| First name, Last name | The person's name. |
| Display name | How your store addresses the customer. Leave it empty to use their name, or a business's company. |
| Company | Required for a business. |
| Tax id | Such as a VAT number. |
| Exempt from tax | For a business that pays no tax, such as a reseller or a charity you hold a certificate for. When they check out signed in, no tax is charged. Guests are always taxed. |
| Why they are exempt | Such as the resale certificate number, for your records. |
| For a guest, the email you write to. For a customer with an account, it's the account's email and is changed on the account. | |
| Phone | A number to reach them. |
| Accepts marketing | Tick it when the customer agreed to news and offers. Order and payment messages are always sent. |
Below the details, Account links to the customer's account when they have one, and shows when they became a customer and when they were last active. Orders lists the customer's recent orders, each linking to the order, and Merged guest checkouts lists any guest customers merged into this one.
If someone else saved the customer while you were editing, your changes aren't saved and you're asked to review theirs first.
Store credit and points
With the Store Credit and Loyalty Points features on, a customer's page has two more sections below Orders:
- Store credit shows what the store owes the customer in each currency, or No store credit., a form to give or take away credit, and the latest changes with their reasons.
- A section named after your rewards program, such as Rewards, shows the customer's points and what they're worth, such as 1,250 points worth $12.50, a form to give or take away points, and the latest changes.
Both need Manage customers to change, and a reason for every change. Only customers with an account have them: a guest's page says so instead of showing the form. See Store credit, loyalty points and referrals.
Addresses
A customer keeps an address book of up to 20 addresses, such as a home and an office. One can be the default billing address and one the default shipping address; they're the ones offered first when the customer buys.
- Open the customer. Their addresses are listed under Addresses, with badges on the defaults.
- Click Add address, or Edit on an address.
- Choose the Country first. The rest of the form follows it: the fields the country uses, in its order and with its names, such as State and ZIP code for the United States, Post town and Postal code for the United Kingdom, or Prefecture first for Japan. Where a country has a list of states or provinces, you pick one from it.
- Fill in the address, give it a Label such as Home or Office if you like, and click Save.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Label | A name for the address, such as Home or Office. |
| Country | Required. Decides the other fields. |
| Full name | Who receives mail at the address. Required. |
| Company | The business at the address, if any. |
| The address fields | Street address and the second line, then the parts the country uses (city or post town, state, province or prefecture, postal code…). The ones marked * are required for that country. |
| Phone | A number for the courier. |
| Default billing address, Default shipping address | Tick one to make this address the default. Ticking it moves the default from another address; unticking it on the default leaves none. |
The address is checked against its country: a postal code has to look like that country's, and belong to the state or province chosen. A new address starts with the customer's name, company and phone, in the country of their other addresses, and a customer's first address becomes both defaults.
To remove an address, click Delete and confirm. Orders keep their own copy of the addresses they used, so changing or deleting an address never changes a past order.
Address suggestions
Typing an address is slow, and typos send parcels astray. With address suggestions on, every address form, at checkout, in My Account and in the admin, suggests addresses as the street is typed, from Google Places. Picking one fills in the rest of the address.
| Menu | Settings > Address suggestions |
| Permission | Manage address suggestions |
| Feature | Address Suggestions (Google Places) |
What you see depends on your role. If the menu, a button or a setting on this page is missing, ask your administrator to give you the permission listed above or to turn on the feature. Only administrators can turn features on and change site settings.
To set it up:
- In the Google Cloud console, create an API key for the Places API (New), restricted to that API.
- Open Settings > Address suggestions, paste it into Google Places API key, and save.
The key is kept on your server and never sent to shoppers' browsers. Once saved it's never shown again: leave the field blank to keep it, or enter a new key to replace it. To stop suggesting addresses, tick Remove the key and save. Without a key, shoppers type their address themselves.
How shoppers use it:
- After three characters in the street field, a list of Suggested addresses opens under it, in the country chosen in the form, or anywhere when none is chosen.
- The arrow keys move through the list, Enter picks the highlighted address and Escape closes the list. A click or a tap picks one too.
- Picking an address fills in the street, the second line, the city, the state or province, and the postal code, and switches the country when the address is in another one. The shopper checks it and adds what's missing, such as an apartment number.
Google charges your account for the searches. To keep a visitor from running up the bill, turn on the Rate Limits feature: each visitor can then ask for suggestions at most 60 times a minute; typing an address takes about a dozen. Without it, suggestions aren't limited.
Privacy requests
People can ask what you hold on them, or ask you to erase it. Open the customer; the Privacy section at the bottom has both, for those with Manage customers:
- Download data gives you a JSON file with everything the store holds on the customer: their details, addresses, and their orders with the payments for them, and, under commerce, their checkouts, transactions, payments, refunds, subscriptions, installment plans, coupons used and the customer record Stripe keeps for them. Send it to the person who asked.
- Erase personal data removes the customer's name, company, tax id, email, phone, addresses and marketing consent, and the name, email, phone and billing address of their orders. It also removes their name, email and phone from their checkouts, transactions, subscriptions and installment plans, the IP address and browser details their checkouts recorded, what they typed into checkout steps, installment plan notes, the card description shown on plans and transactions, and their name and email at Stripe. You're asked to confirm; it can't be undone. The orders, transactions and plans themselves stay, with their lines, amounts, dates, statuses, invoice and receipt numbers, and the billing country and region, because your accounts and tax records need them. Saved cards stay at Stripe, so a plan or subscription still running is still charged. An erased customer shows This customer's personal data was erased and can't be edited.
Erasing a customer doesn't delete their account. If they also want the account gone, delete the user under Security > Users.
Each download and erasure is listed under Privacy with when it happened and who did it.
How long guest data is kept
Under Settings > Commerce > Customers, Privacy sets how long you keep guests' personal data. Once a day the store applies it:
| Setting | What happens | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Erase inactive guests after (months) | A guest customer who hasn't bought or paid in this many months is erased, as above. | 24 |
| Anonymize guest orders after (months) | A paid or canceled guest order this old loses its name, email, phone and billing address but the country and region, and its checkouts lose the same details, the IP address and browser details, and what was typed into the checkout steps. Orders still awaiting payment keep them until they're settled. | 12 |
Enter 0 to keep the data. Customers with an account are kept while the account exists; erase them on request instead.
My Account
A signed-in customer manages their own details under My Account, with the Manage own customer profile and addresses permission. Every signed-in user has it by default.
- The top of the page edits how the store addresses them: whether they buy for Myself or A business, their name, company, tax id, phone and marketing consent. Their email is shown but is changed on their account.
- Addresses lists their address book, where they add, edit and delete addresses the same way as above.
The first time a user opens My Account, their customer record is made from their account, just as it is on their first order.
On the storefront the same details are on Account details and Addresses in the buyer's account; see The buyer's account. With Store Credit, Loyalty Points or Referrals on, the account also has Store credit, Rewards and Refer a friend.
Try it with the sample store
The Product listing: online store sample recipe (Configuration > Recipes) enables Customers and adds two sample customers: Sam Carter, a person with a home and a work address, and Contoso Supplies, a business in Canada with a tax id. Open them under Commerce > Customers to see the details, address book and privacy actions.