Swell saves customer account information to collect and provide data on your customers and their purchases. When a customer signs up for an account on your storefront, an account entry is automatically created for them in the dashboard under Customers. This entry stores their profile information in their account which is used in the storefront. Customer accounts can also be manually created and managed within the Swell dashboard.
By default, Swell customer accounts serve as individual customer accounts—storing personal billing, contact, and shipping information. Swell also accommodates the creation of business customers with the ability to enable a collection of business-specific fields, including tax ID numbers.
Swell stores all customer information within the account model.
From the storefront, customers can access their information when signed in to their accounts by viewing their profile. Your customers can save various types of information to their profiles to streamline their checkout experience—like their payment info, contact information, and addresses.
To manage customer information, click on the customer’s name to open the customer details page. This page displays their credit balance, the total amount spent, average order size, and other personal information. Click Edit or Add beside contact, shipping address, password, or card on file to change or add those details to the customer profile.
Customers can store multiple payment methods on their accounts. Swell keeps these on file and provides the ability to choose from stored payment methods when a customer is making a purchase or when creating an order. Store customer cards in the Card on file section.
Credits can also be directly added or subtracted from a customer’s account. In the case of a return, refund, or similar situation, you can offer store credit as a way to compensate customers for things like inconveniences or promotional purposes.
When viewing a customer, the amount of credit available on an account appears in purple under their Credit balance. Click this to open the edit window. Enter an amount and currency to add credit to the account and choose from one of the following reasons:
- Promotional
- Customer service incident
- Other
From this window, you can also subtract store credit from the account and view the account credit history—showing all instances in which credit has been added or removed from the customer’s account. Selecting the purple Add or Subtract button will save the account credit adjustment and update the account balance accordingly.
To create a new customer, go to the Customer section of your dashboard and click the New customer button. A window will appear for entering the customer’s first name, last name, email, and password. New customers can be opted into your store’s email marketing and assigned to customer groups during the creation process. You can also specify the customer’s preferred language and currency—press Save customer to finalize the new customer account.
Swell offers the ability to both import and export customer lists from the dashboard either as JSON or CSV files. Access these actions from the Customer section located to the left of the New customer button.
Please note that you must have at least one customer created for your store for the export feature to show.
To delete a customer, click on the customer’s name to open the customer details page, then click Delete customer at the bottom of the page. To protect from accidental deletion, you’ll need to confirm the action.
Each customer entry within Swell tracks customer activity over time—providing insights into customer behavior. From within each customer profile found under the Customer tab, you can view a customer's order history, active subscriptions, abandoned carts, and other lifetime metrics such as the total amount a customer has spent in your store and the average total for each purchase.
Additional configuration options for customers are found within the Settings area of the Swell dashboard. These allow for further refinement of how your store organizes customer accounts.
This setting can be used to alter how you display products and pricing for retail and business customers. First, this functionality must be enabled in Settings > Customers. Once enabled, you can set the Customer type as Business when creating a new customer in the dashboard.
For companies selling B2B in the EU or other regions requiring VAT number registration, enable the VAT number setting to show this field on customer forms in the Swell dashboard. Please note that Swell does not validate VAT numbers automatically, though they may be a requirement in countries you sell to.
Customers can be converted from an individual customer account to a business customer account through the dashboard.
For this feature to be available, you must first enable the business customer type under Settings > Customers in your dashboard.
To convert a customer account type to a business account, navigate to the Customer tab in the Swell dashboard and select the individual customer you would like to convert to a business customer. Click Edit next to the customer’s contact information, and select the Convert to business customer option at the bottom of the editor window. Click Save to finalize your changes.
The action of converting a customer to a business customer cannot be undone.
You can also create customer groups under Settings > Customers. These can set specific store behavior for various groups—such as price rules and discounts. A common use case for this feature is to create a wholesale group and apply B2B pricing for verified wholesale customers. The Swell dashboard and API reference the group name and ID and are not normally displayed to customers through the storefront.
Customer addresses can be created, edited, or removed from the customer profile, and used on orders and subscriptions. In the side panel of the page, the number of customer addresses on file is listed under Addresses with the default address on display.
The address book manager can be opened by clicking on the Manage button in the section header.
The addresses modal displays all addresses on file with the default address fixed to the top of the list. This is what will be used on new orders and subscriptions for the customer, unless overridden. Any address can be set as the default by clicking Set as default on the right side of the address row.
To add another address to the customer profile, click Add address in the footer of the list of addresses. You will now see a form with input fields to enter the address details. Once done, click Save to create new the address.
To make changes to an existing address, click Edit on the right side of the address row. You will now see a form with input fields to modify the chosen address. When done making changes, click Save.
To delete an existing address, click the Edit button on the right side of the address row. At the bottom, click Remove address and confirm the action.