Add and edit a customer

A customer record is what ties a sale to a person, so their history, their group pricing, and their emailed receipt all have somewhere to go.

Add one in the back office

1. Go to Customers > Customers and select Add customer.
2. On Basic, fill in First name. It is required.
3. Fill in Phone or Email. At least one of the two is required, because a customer nobody can reach is a customer you cannot send a receipt to.
4. Open Details if you want to set their Customer group or type your own Customer code. Leave the code blank and OLET generates one.
5. Add anything else you have on Address, Settings (loyalty and marketing switches), and Custom.
6. Select Add customer.

The list reloads with the new person in it, and any search or group filter you had on is cleared so you can see them.

Add one at the register

Your staff can create a customer mid-sale without leaving the sell screen, using the same form. See Add a customer to a sale.

Anyone created that way appears in the back office list straight away. There is no separate register-only customer list.

Edit one

Select the pencil at the end of a customer’s row, change what you need, and select Save changes.

A few rules the form holds you to:

• First name cannot be emptied. Every customer needs a name to show on a sale.
• You cannot take away the last way to reach them. If a customer has a phone or an email today, the record has to keep at least one of them. A record that never had either stays editable as it is.
• The customer code can be changed but not removed. Every customer has one.

Clearing a field and saving really does clear it. An emptied website, note, or address line comes back empty.

The walk-in customer

Your store has one built-in customer that every anonymous sale is filed against. It is marked as a system record, its name and code cannot be changed, and it cannot be erased. That is deliberate: its name is on every walk-in receipt and its code is what a CSV import keys on.

Bring a list in from a CSV

Use Import customers above the table on Customers > Customers to upload a file.

The columns match what an export writes, so the cleanest way to get the shape right is to export first, edit that file, and import it back. See the export section of Customer data requests.

What the importer expects:

• first_name is the one required column.
• Each row needs an id or a customer_code. A row with neither is refused. A row whose id matches an existing customer updates that customer. A customer_code OLET has never seen creates a new one.
• Every row still needs a phone or an email, the same rule the form uses.
• customer_group_name is matched by name, ignoring capitals, so VIP and vip are the same group. A name you do not have is refused rather than guessed at. Blank means the group is left alone, or the default group on a new customer.
• A blank cell leaves that field alone. To empty a field on purpose, put <clear> in the cell.

The import runs in the background. If some rows are wrong, the good ones are still written and OLET tells you rows were skipped, with a Download report link naming each rejected row and why. Fix those rows and upload just them again.

If you can’t make changes

Adding, editing, importing and deleting customers all need the “Add, edit and delete customers” permission, which an admin gives in Settings > Permissions. Without it, the buttons are switched off and “You don’t have permission to add, edit or delete customers.” sits beside them. A customer you open is read only.

If it goes wrong

• The Add button does nothing. First name is empty. It is required, and the button stays off until it has something in it.
• “At least one of phone or email is required.” Fill in one of them and save again.
• A red banner at the top of the form. Read it before scrolling. It carries the failures that do not belong to a single field.
• “Imported with issues.” That is a partial import, not a success. Download the report and look at the skipped rows.
• A field you cleared came back. Save again and check the field is really empty rather than holding a space.

What next

• Customers overview
• Customer groups
• Add a customer to a sale