Adding and editing a customer — two side effects

Customers are usually created automatically when orders are imported (Customer duplicates — why the same person may appear twice). Manual creation is the exception and has two side effects worth knowing about.

Step by step

Add a customer manually

1. Open Customers and click Add customer in the list header. The button is hidden if your role does not have permission to add customers.
2. The Add customer drawer slides out from the right. The form is empty each time it opens.
3. In Contact details, fill in Name or Last name; either one is enough. Company name, Tax ID / VAT, Email, and Phone are optional. The form immediately marks an invalid email address.
4. In Shipping address, fill in Street, Postal code, and City, then choose a Country from the list. The order created with the customer will use this address. Number is optional.
5. Under Settings, choose the Sales channel—the store or marketplace the customer came from. The list shows your company’s active marketplaces and online stores. The default is General (no sales channel); keep it if the customer did not come from one.
6. Enable Master carton (B2B) if shipments to this customer should use a master carton. Payment method is optional: what you enter is used on the order created with the customer; leaving it empty keeps the default value B2B_B2B_B2B.
7. Click Add. If a required value is missing, the customer will not be saved: missing name and last name appear under their fields, and missing address details are listed above the buttons. A save failure reason appears there too. Cancel closes the drawer without saving.
8. After saving, you will see Customer added, and the panel will open the new customer card on the Customer details tab. The customer list refreshes automatically; the new customer appears when you return to it.

Correct details on the customer card

1. Open Customers and click the customer row; the panel switches to the Customer details tab.
2. On the Customer card, click the pencil icon on the right of its header (tooltip: Edit).
3. Correct Name, Last name, Email, Phone, and Tax ID/VAT.
4. Save with the green checkmark in the card header. The red X next to it discards changes. Neither icon has a label or tooltip.

The Master carton (B2B) switch is separate, at the bottom of the card, and visible only outside edit mode. It saves immediately when clicked, without confirmation.

Adding a customer creates an order

Saving a new customer also creates an address and an order with the description “Initial Client Order” in the new order status.

The order uses the address from the form and the selected Sales channel. If General is selected, it goes to the company’s manual orders.

The consequences are real:

• an order appears in the order list even though no one placed it;
• the customer immediately has one order, so their card statistics do not start at zero;
• they cannot be deleted in bulk—the deletion operation skips customers with orders (Deleting customers).

To keep a clean customer database without artificial orders, create customers through order import, not manually.

Required fields

You cannot save a customer without Name or Last name (one is enough) and a Country. The rest of the address is also required: Street, Postal code, and City, because the order created with the customer uses that address. You can leave all other fields, including Company name, empty.

Editing can change an order

Saving a customer with a payment method filled in copies it to their oldest order.

The form does not mention this. If you are only correcting a phone number or email, leave the payment method alone.

Edit on the customer card

Edit name, last name, email, phone, and tax ID directly on the customer card using the steps above; there is no separate customer edit form. The Master carton (B2B) switch is there too.

Both actions require the Customers permission with write access.

B2B switch

It marks a customer as a business. Among other things, this affects whether shipments to them are created as consolidated cartons; this is separate from wholesale order consolidation (Wholesale orders — a status, not a separate order type).

You cannot save masked data

If your role sees customer details in masked form, the system rejects attempts to save them with a message saying you do not have permission for that field. This prevents overwriting the real phone number with asterisks (Masking customer data — who can see what).