Customers & segments

Customers lists everyone who has bought from you or signed up — with their orders, addresses, tags, notes, marketing consent, store-credit balance, and any custom fields you collect. Segments turn that list into audiences that maintain themselves so you can target campaigns, discounts, and tax zones.

The customer profile

Open Customers and select anyone to see their profile, organised into four tabs:

• Overview — name, contact details, lifetime Total Spent, order count, first/last order date, Tags, Internal Notes, birthday, tax-exempt flag, and the Marketing status for their email.
• Addresses — saved shipping/billing addresses, with one set as default.
• Store Credit — current balance, the ledger of every credit and spend, and the Issue Store Credit action.
• Activity — a log of logins, invites, address changes, consent updates, and store-credit events.

Tags and notes are free-form. Internal Notes are private to staff and never shown to the buyer. Tags also drive segments (see below), so a consistent tagging scheme — wholesale, vip, trade-show-2026 — pays off later.

Creating a customer manually

You don’t have to wait for someone to check out. Use Customers → Add Customer to create a profile yourself — useful for a wholesale account, a phone order, or a walk-in.

1. Go to Customers → Add Customer.

2. Enter a name. Add an Email or Phone if you have one — either can be the login identifier, or you can leave both blank for a name-only record with no login access.

3. Optionally add Tags, Internal Notes, a birthday, a default address, and any custom fields.

4. Choose whether to Send Invite immediately. When on, the customer gets an email/SMS invite to set up their account; when off, the profile is created silently and you can invite later from the profile.

5. Save.

Note

Editing the profile (name, tags, notes, contact details) never changes marketing consent — consent is recorded through its own action, described below. Deleting a customer anonymises the record; it does not erase order history.

Marketing consent

A customer’s email marketing status is one of four states, shown on the Overview tab under Marketing:

State	Meaning
Subscribed	Opted in — eligible to receive marketing email.
Not subscribed	No consent record exists yet (the default).
Pending	Awaiting double-opt-in confirmation.
Unsubscribed	Opted out — suppressed from all marketing email.

You record a customer’s consent; you don’t grant it on their behalf. To update it, open the Marketing status and choose Subscribed, Pending, or Unsubscribed. Recording Subscribed requires you to confirm that the customer actually gave consent. Recording Unsubscribed adds a suppression so they never receive marketing email again — even if they later match a segment.

Caution

A subscribed customer can still be blocked from email by a hard bounce, spam complaint, or provider block. When that happens the status shows subscribed but the contact is not actually reachable, and campaigns skip them automatically.

Store credit

Store credit is a balance you can grant a customer and they can spend at checkout — useful for goodwill gestures, refunds-to-credit, or promotions.

1. Open the customer, go to the Store Credit tab, and choose Issue Store Credit.

2. Enter an Amount (in your store currency), an optional Note explaining the reason, and an optional Expiration Date.

3. Confirm. The balance updates immediately and the credit appears in the ledger.

Every movement is recorded in the store-credit ledger with the amount, the running balance, a reason (refund, promotion, adjustment, or order payment), and any note — so you always have an audit trail. At checkout the buyer can Apply store credit to reduce what they owe, and any expiry you set is honoured.

Tip

Store credit is different from gift cards. Credit is tied to one customer’s account and applied automatically when they’re signed in; a gift card is a transferable code anyone holding it can redeem.

How segments work

A segment is a set of conditions combined with AND/OR groups. There are two kinds:

• Dynamic segments update themselves. Membership is recomputed from your conditions, so a “VIP” segment always contains today’s VIPs — not the ones who qualified when you created it. Use these for almost everything.
• Static segments are a fixed, hand-picked list of customers you add and remove manually. Use these for one-off lists — a trade-show invite, a curated VIP roster — where membership shouldn’t change on its own.

The segment type is chosen at creation and cannot be changed afterwards.

Starter segments ship with your store

You don’t have to build common audiences from scratch — every new store is seeded with thirteen dynamic segments you can use immediately, duplicate, or edit:

Segment	Who it contains
Email subscribers	Customers subscribed to email marketing
Repeat customers	Two or more orders placed
New customers	Joined in the last 30 days
Abandoned checkouts (30 days)	Abandoned a checkout in the last 30 days
Never purchased	No orders yet
Lapsed customers	Past buyers with no order in over 90 days
Loyalty members with 500+ points	Enrolled loyalty members holding 500 points or more
Recent reviewers	Left a product review in the last 90 days
Successful referrers	Referred a friend whose referral qualified or was rewarded
COD-heavy customers	Two or more cash-on-delivery orders
Waiting for restock	Have an active back-in-stock request
Upcoming event attendees	Hold a ticket for an event starting soon
Video reviewers	Posted a review that includes a video

To start from one, open it and choose Duplicate — this opens the create form prefilled with its conditions so you can tweak them without touching the original. A Start from a template gallery in the create form offers more ready-made starting points (high spenders, has a location, and others); templates only show fields your store actually supports.

Building a dynamic segment

Segments are written in a small query language — SegmentQL — in an editor with autocomplete, so you compose conditions the way you’d type a search rather than clicking through form rows. A condition looks like amount_spent >= 500; combine conditions with AND / OR and parentheses.

1. Go to Customers → Segments → Create Segment.

2. Give it a name and keep the type as Dynamic.

3. Write your conditions on the WHERE line of the editor. Autocomplete offers the valid attributes, then operators, then values at every step — you never have to memorise names. For example: amount_spent > 5000 AND (customer_location.region = 'IN-TN' OR customer_location.region = 'IN-KA').

4. Anything invalid is underlined in red — hover it to see how to fix it. The Definitions panel lists every attribute with a description, and Templates inserts a ready-made query you can adjust.

5. Press Run (or Ctrl/Cmd + Enter) to see the live member count and a preview of matching customers below the editor.

6. Save. The segment is immediately usable in campaigns and automations.

Tip

The full language — every operator, date form, and function — is documented in the segment query language reference, and every attribute you can filter on is in the segment attribute reference.

What you can filter on

Condition type	Examples
Spend & orders	total spent, number of orders, products/collections purchased, order channel, payment method (COD, deposits), discounts used, refunds and returns
Dates	first/last order date, account-created date — absolute, or relative (IN LAST 90 DAYS)
Recurring dates	birthdays and anniversaries — customer.birthday IN MONTH May for greeting campaigns
Location	city/state/country — or distance from a point for local delivery or store events
Engagement	abandoned checkouts, email opens/clicks, storefront behaviour (viewed, added to cart, searched)
Profile	tags, marketing consent, account state, walk-in customers
Loyalty, reviews & referrals	points balance and tier, review activity (including photo/video reviews), referral status
Gift cards & store credit	gift-card balance and expiry, store-credit balance
Events & restocks	upcoming event ticket holders, back-in-stock requests, cancellation/return requests
Custom fields	any customer metafield — B2B price band, preferences, anything you store

The attribute reference documents every attribute with its type, operators, and examples.

Operators

Each attribute accepts the operators that make sense for its type, written as query syntax — =, !=, >, >=, <, <=, BETWEEN, CONTAINS, STARTS WITH, IN (...), IS NULL / IS NOT NULL, IN LAST / IN NEXT duration forms, IN MONTH / ON for recurring dates, and MATCHES (...) for related records like orders and reviews. Autocomplete only ever offers valid combinations; the complete table with examples is in the language reference.

Filtering on custom fields (metafields)

If you store extra data on customers as metafields — a B2B price band, a renewal date, a preference — you can segment on it by path:

metafields.b2b.price_band = 'gold'
metafields.facts.renewal_date IN NEXT 30 DAYS

Metafield conditions need a metafield definition with Use as filter enabled for the customer owner type; if your field doesn’t autocomplete, check its definition under Settings → Custom data. Date and date-time customer metafields also support the recurring-date operators. If a definition that segments rely on is later deleted, the affected conditions are removed automatically, membership is recomputed, and the segment shows a note explaining what changed.

Refreshing and stale counts

Dynamic membership is recomputed asynchronously, so the member count can lag a save by a moment while the recompute runs. The segment surfaces its state rather than showing a silently stale number:

• Computing / Refreshing — a recompute is queued or running.
• Last refreshed / Last updated — when the count was last accurate.
• Refresh failed — the last recompute errored; the shown count may be stale.

To force a recompute, open the segment (or use its row menu) and choose Refresh / Refresh Now. Relative-date and recurring-date segments also refresh on their own schedule, since “in the last 30 days” shifts every day.

Exporting members to CSV

You can export a segment’s members for a mail-merge, an offline campaign, or your records.

1. Open the segment and choose Export members (CSV).

2. Sellerlane prepares the file in the background — the page shows Preparing your export.

3. When it’s ready the download starts automatically. The CSV contains name, email, phone, order count, total spent, and joined date for each current member.

Note

The download link is signed and short-lived. If it expires before you save the file, just run Export members again.

Using a segment downstream

A saved segment is a reusable audience across Sellerlane:

• Marketing — from a segment, choose Use segment to start a new marketing email with that segment preselected as the audience. See Marketing emails and Marketing attribution.
• Discounts — restrict a discount’s eligibility to a segment, so only matching customers can use it. See Discounts.
• Taxes — attach a segment to a tax zone for tax-exempt or special-rate groups. See Taxes.

Deleting a segment safely

Before you delete, Sellerlane checks where the segment is referenced and shows a “This segment is in use” panel listing the tax zones, campaigns, scheduled emails, discounts, and loyalty point campaigns that depend on it. If anything references it, deletion is blocked until you detach the segment from those first. If nothing references it, you’ll see Nothing references this segment. It’s safe to delete and the delete proceeds.

Troubleshooting

Member count is 0 or hasn’t updated. The recompute may still be running — check for a Computing / Refreshing state and try Refresh. If it stays at 0, your conditions probably match no one; broaden them and preview. New seeded segments and empty rule trees use a “match none” policy, so an empty segment correctly contains nobody rather than everybody.

A customer I’d expect to see is missing. Confirm they meet every AND condition and at least one OR branch, and remember relative-date windows (“last 90 days”) move each day. For marketing use, an Unsubscribed customer still appears in the segment but is suppressed from campaigns — that’s by design.

The export download link expired. Signed links are short-lived. Run Export members again to generate a fresh one.

Member count looks stale after a save. Recompute is asynchronous. Wait for the state to clear or click Refresh to force it.

Next steps

• Segment query language — the full SegmentQL reference: operators, dates, functions, and metafield paths.
• Segment attribute reference — every attribute you can filter on, with types and examples.
• Marketing — target a segment with marketing emails and automations.
• Customer accounts — the buyer-facing login and profile experience.
• Store credit — how credit works end to end.
• Metafields — define the custom fields you segment on.
• Discounts and Taxes — apply a segment downstream.