Customers

In this document, you’ll learn about Customers and their relation to other entities in Medusa.

Introduction

Customers are individuals that make purchases in your store. In Medusa, there are two types of customers: registered customers and guests or unregistered customers.

Both registered and unregistered customers can make purchases. However, only registered customers can log into their accounts and manage their details and orders.

An admin user can view and manage their customers, their details, their orders, and what customer group they’re in.

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Customer Entity Overview

A customer is stored in the database as a Customer entity. A customer has attributes related to the customer’s details such as first_name, last_name, and phone. However, the only required attribute is email.

has_account Attribute

As mentioned earlier, customers can be either registered or unregistered. The type of customer is identified in the has_account attribute. This is a boolean attribute that indicates whether the customer is registered.

For example, when a guest customer places an order, a new Customer record is created with the email used (if it doesn’t already exist) and the value for has_account is false. When the unregistered customer creates an account using the same email, a new Customer record will be created with the value of has_account set to true.

Email Uniqueness

An email is unique to a type of customer. So, an email can be associated with only one registered customer (where has_account is true), and one unregistered customer (where has_account is false).

In the example mentioned above, after the unregistered customer places an order with an email, then creates an account with the same email, two Customer records are created. Each of these records have different has_account value.

This architecture allows creating the Claim Order flow, where a registered customer can claim an order they placed as an unregistered customer. You can learn more about it in this documentation.

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Relations to Other Entities

CustomerGroup

Customer groups allow dividing customers into groups of similar attributes, then apply special pricing or rules for these customer groups.

You can learn more about customer groups in this documentation.

A customer can belong to more than one customer group. The relation between the Customer and CustomerGroup entities is available on both entities:

• You can access the customer groups of a customer by expanding the groups relation and accessing customer.groups.
• You can access the customers in a customer group by expanding the customers relation and accessing customerGroup.customers.

Orders

Customers can have more than one order. The relation between the Customer and Order entities is available on both entities:

• You can access the orders of a customer by expanding the orders relation and accessing customer.orders.
• You can access the customer that placed an order by expanding the customer relation and accessing order.customer.

Address

A customer can have a billing address and more than one shipping address. Both billing and shipping addresses are represented by the Address entity.

The relation between the Customer and Address entities is available on both entities:

• You can access the billing address of a customer by expanding the billing_address relation and accessing customer.billing_address. You can also access the shipping addresses of a customer by expanding the shipping_addresses relation and accessing customer.shipping_addresses.
• Likewise, you can access the customer that an address is associated with by expanding the customer relation and accessing address.customer.

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See Also

• Implement customer profiles in the storefront
• Manage customers using the admin APIs