Customers

Litestore keeps a record for every person who buys from the store. You use these records to look up someone's orders, addresses and spend, and to send email to people based on the products they've actually bought.

Customers and accounts

Litestore stores customer records, addresses, order history, wishlists and lifetime spend in the store's own database.

A customer record represents someone who does business with the store, and it exists whether or not the person ever signs in. For example, someone who has bought from the store twice as a guest without creating an account is still a customer, with a record, an order history and a lifetime spend.

Litestore stores customer data in four records:

Customer
CustomerAddress
Wishlist
CustomerInvitation

Email uniqueness

A database index ensures that each email address belongs to only one customer, and it ignores upper and lower case. This prevents one person from ending up as several customers in the store.

Without this rule, a single person could end up with three records and their spend split across all of them. Their order history would look smaller than it is, and their lifecycle stage might say "new" even though they're on their fifth purchase.

Because the rule is enforced by the database rather than by a particular screen, it applies to every way a customer can be created, whether through checkout, invitation, sign-in or import.

Guest customers

When someone checks out as a guest, Litestore still creates a customer record for them.

The first time that person signs in with the same email, Litestore links their login account to that record.

Since the guest orders were attached to a customer record from the start, nothing is lost. When the person signs in later, their account is connected to their existing history instead of starting a new one.

Sign-in

Customers and staff use the same login page, and both receive an emailed sign-in link.

Litestore doesn't support email-and-password sign-in, so there's no signup form, password field or reset flow. If you configure Google sign-in, customers can use it as an alternative.

The role on the account determines whether someone is a staff member or a customer. Both use the same login.

This removes a lot of support work and security risk. Litestore never stores passwords, so they can't be leaked or reused, and nobody can persuade your support team to reset one for them.

Invitations

Inviting someone by email makes them an invited customer.

When they sign in with that email, Litestore accepts the invitation automatically. They don't need to click anything else, because the sign-in link already confirms they own the address.

A person can only have one pending invitation at a time, so inviting someone again doesn't leave several active invitations.

Customer account

Signed-in customers have their own dashboard with pages for their overview, orders, discounts, reviews and settings. Customers edit their addresses under settings, and the wishlist has its own page.

Customers request returns and refunds from the order itself rather than from a separate screen. This keeps the request attached to the relevant order, and the customer can see that order while they make the request.

Lifetime spend

Litestore adds to a customer's spend and order count when an order is paid, and it subtracts them again when an order is cancelled.

Subtracting cancelled orders is important. If the figure only ever increased, it would count attempted purchases rather than actual spend and would overstate the value of every customer who had cancelled an order.

Litestore also runs a permanent alarm that lists any customer whose stored totals don't match the sum of their paid orders. Instead of relying on the stored figure, Litestore checks it against the orders and shows any mismatch for you to investigate.

Lifecycle stages

Each customer is at exactly one stage:

new
invited
registered
purchased
repeat
restricted
banned

Litestore calculates the stage from the customer's order count, their account state and any active invitation.

You don't assign the stage by hand like a tag. Nobody needs to move someone from purchased to repeat, and nobody can mark a customer as repeat by mistake after a single purchase.

Email broadcasts can target these stages, and because the stages are calculated from order data, a campaign aimed at repeat customers reaches the people whose order history shows they're repeat customers.

Litestore excludes restricted, banned and unsubscribed customers from broadcasts.

Customer record

Quick reference

Open the customer record for anything about the person. It shows their history, addresses, spend, score and conversations with the store's staff.

Open the order for anything about a single purchase, including any returns and refunds on it.

Use lifecycle stages instead of manual tags when you segment email, because Litestore calculates the stages from the orders people have actually placed.

The customer record is the person's identity in the store, and signing in is how they prove they're that customer.

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