Merging duplicate customers

Two profiles for the same person happen: someone checks out by phone once and signs up by email later, or a secondary contact slips past deduplication. Merge folds one profile into the other so orders, addresses, and history all resolve to a single customer.

Caution

Merging is permanent. The profile you merge away is deleted and cannot be recovered. Read what blocks a merge and what moves before you confirm.

Keeper and loser

A merge is always between two profiles in the same store. You pick which one survives.

• The keeper (survivor) is the profile that remains. Its identity, primary contacts, and login stay as they are.
• The loser is folded into the keeper and then deleted. It leaves no tombstone and no “merged into” pointer — it is gone.

A good default keeper is the older record, or the one that already has login enabled. Sellerlane surfaces a suggested keeper, but the choice is yours.

What blocks a merge

To keep bearer-value money from silently moving between profiles, a merge is refused when either the keeper or the loser:

• Has store credit — any store-credit lot or ledger entry, of any balance.
• Has an active gift card — a gift card assigned to or purchased by the customer.
• Is already anonymized (or mid-anonymization) — its identity is gone, so merging is meaningless.

When a merge is blocked, the admin shows exactly which of these applies to which profile. Resolve it first — for example, spend down or refund store credit, or handle the gift card — and then merge. There are no other block conditions: store credit and gift cards are the only value gates.

Note

Store credit blocks a merge on Sellerlane rather than transferring across profiles. This is a deliberate choice — bearer-adjacent balances should never move without an explicit, auditable action.

What moves

When a merge runs, everything the loser owned is reparented onto the keeper in a single transaction:

• Orders — including their original attribution, so history and later anonymization still reach the loser’s original orders.
• Addresses.
• Contacts — the loser’s emails and phones move over; duplicates are deduplicated and the keeper keeps its own primary email and phone.
• Marketing consent — consent travels with each contact point, keyed to the contact value itself. Re-pointing a contact to the keeper is a pure ownership move; the consent record is never rewritten and consent states are never blended between two different contacts.
• Loyalty balance.
• Tags, notes, and custom fields — notes are concatenated; on a conflicting custom field the keeper’s value wins.
• Discount usage — the loser’s per-customer discount usage folds onto the keeper’s identity, so a “once per customer” discount cannot be reset by merging.

Segment memberships are recomputed from the merged profile, not copied. Every merge writes an audit activity on the keeper capturing a snapshot of the loser’s identity and the record counts that moved.

Run a merge

1. Open one of the two customer profiles. If Sellerlane flagged a possible duplicate, you will see a prompt linking the pair.

2. Choose Merge, then pick the keeper — the profile that survives.

3. Review the summary of what will move and confirm. If a value gate applies, the dialog tells you what to resolve first.

4. The loser is folded in and deleted. The keeper now carries the combined orders, contacts, and history.

Tip

Duplicates that Sellerlane detects on its own (two contacts pointing at two different profiles at checkout) show up as a possible-duplicate signal on both profiles, so you can find and review merge candidates instead of hunting for them. See customer contacts.

The contact model

Why duplicates form and how contacts and verification work: customer contacts.

Deleting vs anonymizing

Removing a customer entirely is different from merging — see customers & segments.