Customers and vendors

Customers are the parties an account sells to; vendors are the parties an account buys from. Both are kept per account, both have a main contact, an optional billing contact and any number of other contacts, and both can be switched off when you no longer do business with them. Customers can additionally be anonymized to remove personal data.

You find them in the sidebar under Customers and Vendors. Users with the Shopify account owner role do not see these menu items.

Customers versus order addresses

Most webshop orders carry their own delivery and billing address and do not need a customer record at all. A customer record is useful when you ship to the same party repeatedly (typically business customers), want to see all orders of one customer together, or need customer-specific settings such as whether backorders are allowed.

Who can do what

Action	Who
View customers and vendors	Every user with access to the menu item; you see the records of the current account and its sub-accounts
Create, edit, activate, deactivate	Admins, warehouse associates and the account owner of the account the customer or vendor belongs to
Anonymize a customer	Same as above, and only when the customer is disabled

The customers and vendors lists

Both lists show the same columns: Account (only when the current account has sub-accounts), Name, Contact (last name, first name of the main contact), Company, Email, Phone, City, State or province, Country, State and Created at. They are sorted by contact name. Like all tables you can search, filter (for example on State or Account), save custom views and export; see Working with tables.

Creating a customer or vendor

1. Open Customers (or Vendors) in the sidebar.
2. Choose Create from the menu at the top of the list.
3. On the Attributes tab, enter the Name and fill in the main contact (see Contact fields).
4. Optionally fill in the Billing contact tab, if invoices go to a different party or address.
5. Optionally add Notes and Metadata on the Meta Data tab.
6. Save.

The customer or vendor is created in the current account (see Account switch) and cannot be moved to another account later. Switch to the right account before you create it. New customers and vendors start in state Active.

Required fields for vendors

A vendor's main contact must have at least a Last name, Postal code, City and Country. The postal code is not required for countries that do not use postal codes (such as Ireland). Customers have no required contact fields; a customer without a name is shown as Untitled.

The customer or vendor page

Tab	Contents
Attributes	Name and main contact
Billing contact	The billing contact. If you empty all its fields and save, the billing contact is removed
Other Contacts	Additional contacts, see below (only after the record is saved)
Meta Data	Free-format notes and metadata (YAML), for example references used by an integration
Orders	All orders that refer to this customer or vendor

On a customer page you also find a settings panel with four settings that can be set for this customer only:

• Backorder allowed: allow backorders, or cancel lines that cannot be allocated;
• Auto allocate: allocate this customer's orders automatically;
• Auto allocate backorders: allocate this customer's backorders automatically when stock arrives;
• Partial shipping: allow orders to be shipped partially.

Values set here override the account-wide value for orders of this customer.

Contacts

Contact fields

Every contact (main, billing or other) has the same fields:

Field	Notes
Company name
First name, Last name
Address lines	One address line per line in the text box
Postal code, City, State or province code
Country code	Choose from the list; a typed country name is converted to its two-letter code
Phone number, Fax number	Must be valid phone numbers
Email	Must be a valid e-mail address
VATIN	VAT identification number
EORI number	Economic Operators Registration and Identification number, needed for customs
Chamber of commerce number

After saving, Boxture determines the geographic coordinates of the address in the background.

Contact kinds

Each contact has a kind that says what it is used for. Each customer and vendor has one main contact (of kind Customer or Vendor) and at most one Billing contact. On the Other Contacts tab you can add more, choosing from these kinds:

Kind	Typical use
Billing	Who receives the invoice
Delivery	A delivery address
Pickup	Where goods are collected
Importer	The importer of record for customs
Exporter	The exporter of record for customs

The kind field also accepts free text, so you can type your own kind (for example Warehouse manager). Accounts can define additional contact kinds for their own contacts with the Contact kinds setting.

To add a contact:

1. Open the customer or vendor and click Add contact.
2. Choose or type the Kind and fill in the fields.
3. Save, or click Go back to return without saving.

Activate, deactivate and anonymize

The menu on a customer or vendor page shows the actions that are possible in its current state.

Action	From state	To state	Effect
Deactivate	Active	Disabled	The customer or vendor can no longer be chosen on new orders. Existing orders are not affected
Activate	Disabled	Active	Can be chosen on orders again. Not possible for an anonymized customer
Anonymize (customers only)	Disabled	Disabled, anonymized	Removes personal data permanently (see below)

Anonymizing a customer

Anonymizing supports privacy regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA ("right to be forgotten"). It is only offered for disabled customers: deactivate the customer first.

When you anonymize a customer:

• the customer's name, notes and metadata are cleared;
• in every contact of the customer, the company name, first and last name, address lines, phone number, fax number and e-mail address are replaced by asterisks (*). Postal code, city, state or province and country are kept, so statistics per region remain possible;
• the customer is marked as anonymized and can never be activated again.

This cannot be undone

Anonymized data cannot be restored. Orders and shipments of the customer keep their own address data; anonymize those separately, or let Boxture do so automatically with the Order anonymize period and Shipment anonymize period settings. See Anonymization.

Vendors are companies rather than private persons and cannot be anonymized; deactivate them instead.

Using customers and vendors on orders

• When creating a sales order you can select a customer. Only active customers of the current account and its sub-accounts are offered.
• A purchase order refers to the vendor the goods come from. Products can also have a default vendor; see Product details.
• The Orders tab of a customer or vendor lists all their orders, and the orders list can be filtered on customer or vendor.