How customers work
A customer is the buyer on an order — who they are, how to reach them, and where things go.
B2C or B2B is decided by one link
A customer linked to a customer account is a B2B buyer, acting for that business. A customer with no link is a B2C buyer, buying for themselves.
There is no flag to set and no separate list to maintain. Creating the link is what makes someone a trade buyer.
The consequence is that the commercial arrangement lives on the account, not the person. Payment terms, invoicing and credit belong to the business, so several buyers from the same business share one set of terms — which is what you want, since they are one customer commercially even if they are three people.
A customer belongs to one organisation
The same person buying from two of your organisations is two separate records with no connection between them.
This is the same commercial divider that runs through the rest of Yessort, and it is deliberate. Two organisations sharing a warehouse do not share their customer lists, and one cannot see the other's buyers.
Email is not unique, on purpose
Several customer records can carry the same email address, and Yessort does not treat that as a duplicate.
Two reasons. Guest checkouts repeat an address freely — the same person buying three times without an account is three records at the channel, and Yessort records what happened rather than guessing they are one person. And one person may genuinely hold several records, buying for themselves sometimes and for a business other times.
So searching by email can return more than one row. That is the system being accurate, not untidy.
Identity on a channel
A customer bought through a channel has an identity there too — the channel's own reference for them. Yessort keeps that separately, per channel, so an order arriving from a store can be matched to the right customer even though the channel's identifiers are nothing like Yessort's.
One customer can carry an identity on more than one channel.
Addresses
A customer can have several addresses. Billing and delivery need not match, and a business buyer often has one billing address and many delivery points.
Personal data does not stay forever
Customer records carry a retention horizon, and personal data is blanked once it passes. The horizon extends when the customer orders again, so active customers are not anonymised out from under you.