Customers
A customer is the buyer on an order. That is the whole of it for most sales: someone bought something, and this is who they are.
Some buyers act for a business rather than themselves, and that is where the second entity comes in.
One rule explains most of this area
A customer linked to a customer account is a B2B buyer. A customer with no link is a B2C buyer.
There is no separate flag and no separate list. The link is the difference.
Everything commercial — payment terms, invoicing, credit — hangs off the account, not the customer. So a trade buyer's terms are the account's terms, and three people ordering for the same business share them.
The three things here
Customers are people who bought. Name, contact details, addresses, and the identity the channel knows them by.
Customer accounts are the businesses you trade with. One account has many buyers acting for it, and it carries the commercial arrangement.
Customer groups collect customers or accounts together under a label. Today that is all they do — see customer groups before setting one up expecting more.
Two things that surprise people
A customer belongs to one organisation. The same person buying from two of your organisations is two separate records, with no link between them. That is deliberate, and it is the same commercial divider that runs through the rest of Yessort.
Email is not unique. Guest checkouts repeat the same address freely, and one person may hold several customer records. Yessort does not merge them, so searching an email can return more than one row and that is correct rather than a duplicate.
Not every setting does something
An account carries several fields, and they are not equal. Some change what happens; others are recorded for your reference and nothing reads them.
That distinction matters enough to have its own page — see what an account decides. It is worth reading before relying on a setting.
Concepts
- How customers work — records, linkage, and per-channel identity.
- Customer accounts — the businesses you trade with.
- What an account decides — which settings act, and which only record.
- Customer groups — what a group is today.
- Payment terms — how long a customer has to pay, and which setting wins.
- Data retention and anonymising — how long personal data is kept, and what removing it does.
How to
- Add a customer
- Create a customer account
- Link a customer to an account
- Create a customer group
- Set an account's invoicing strategy
- Anonymise a customer