Ooooby does not support full customer deletion for accounting and legal reasons. However, you can archive a customer manually so they are no longer contactable or able to place new orders.
This helps you comply with GDPR’s data minimisation rules while preserving essential records for financial and legal purposes.
What does archiving a customer do?
Archiving a customer:
Prevents any further contact with them
Anonymises or removes identifiable personal data
Retains necessary order and payment records for auditing
Ensures any email records are automatically deleted from the system after a few weeks
Step-by-step: How to archive a customer
Follow these steps to safely archive a customer:
1. Change their email address
Update their email so it cannot be used for communication:
Change the existing username to
archive+and some numbersChange the domain to
@ooooby.comWhy:
This ensures the customer won’t receive any future emails. Using the@ooooby.comdomain, which is controlled by Ooooby, guarantees that the email address won’t accidentally deliver messages to a real user elsewhere on the internet. Adding random numbers helps avoid clashes with other archived addresses within Ooooby's system.
Example:
If the customer’s email is [email protected], change it to: [email protected]
"Archived Customer Details"
2. Update their phone number
Replace the phone number with all zeroes or your hub’s main number.
Why:
This removes personal contact information and prevents future outreach.
3. Edit their address
If possible, delete the address.
If deletion isn't allowed, replace it with your hub’s address.
Why:
This minimises the amount of personal data retained, in line with GDPR.
4. Anonymise their name (optional)
Change the customer name to something generic, e.g. "Deleted Customer".
Why:
This helps anonymise their profile for internal reference while breaking any link to an identifiable person.
5. Remove payment details
Change their payment method to None.
Why:
Prevents future charges and ensures that no payment details are stored unnecessarily.
“Payment method dropdown set to 'None'”
Why can’t I delete the customer entirely?
To comply with financial regulations, Ooooby must retain order history and payment records for auditing and tax reporting. This is a legal requirement and overrides the GDPR right to erasure in most cases.
However, the steps above ensure the customer’s data is no longer actively used, visible, or accessible — satisfying GDPR’s requirements for limiting processing and minimising retention.
If you receive a data deletion request, you can explain that the customer’s data has been archived and anonymised and is only retained where legally necessary.