remove account by customer

Just wondering if anyone had given it a thought to give the customer the ability to remove his/her own account via the website & when logged in off course.

Maybe, if coding the definite delete by the customer would be kinda tricky, create an option to request a delete of the entire account from the account section?

My reasoning is to cut back e-mail traffic on administrative issues, and i basicly want all inqueries like newsletter unsubscribe, article notifications, account deletion to be handled from the website.
In the past customer usually sends an email, remove my address from the website and there is confusion if they just want to be removed from mailing list or if they want to remove their account entirely

any thoughts?

There is an unsubscribe from email option built in to Zen Cart. Whether you choose to respect it is your decision, though of course it's recommended and often illegal to ignore it.

Removing customer accounts is much more tricky. What would you do about orders attached to them? If you take these out, you corrupt any sales stats. If you don't existing Zen Cart code is likely to start throwing errors when it can't link to customers who have been removed.

I suspect too that your tax authoritioes would take a dim view of your incomplete records. You may explain that you're declaring income on transactions for which you (and the customers themselves) have destroyed the records, but I bet they'll ask how many more have you not declared.

And how would you portect yourself against fraudsters who order products from you using false payment details, wait until you ship and then remove their accounts with them any information about themselves?

It sounds as though you need to set up proper email management processes, and that the idea of having customers delete their accounts instead is overkill.

Hello kuroi,

Thanks for your instant reply.
The fact is: I finally managed to get the subscribe/unsubscribe for the newsletters managed in a way i am comfortable with and both newsletter only subscribers OR customers can now very easy unsubscribe from newsletters on a single similar webpage if they want to (makes me happy)

Now i want to expand on this and make account deletion as easy as possible. I just want to do a "regular account remove" which means i will not do any changing in the orders table. AFAIK, removing a customer does not affect the orders done in the past and it won't change my tax submissions or whatever in any way. (we do have a regular shop as well and can ensure you we don't ask customers in the regular shop for their address details when they purchase a pencil :cool:)

Put another way: if a customer sends you an email asking to remove their account, what do you do? You simply go to customers, find the customer and delete it, right?

Have to agree that there is a need for not allowing account deletion while an order is in progress, but that sounds like a minor technical if statement somewhere in the code. We only ship when payment was succesful, so don't expect much fraude there?

Thank you for your thoughts on this,

Kind regards,
Jeroen.

I've dug a little deeper and the customers_id field is on the orders table, but I suspect that it's used primarily to find the orders associated with a customer and not the other way around - so that's probably not a problem.

You are right that there is a safe way in the Admin to remove customers, and that's probably the answer to you question. You would need to use the same approach taken there wherever you wished to add this function slightly differently.

You can find the tables that need to be selectively purged and the specific SQl needed in the admin/customers.php file in the deleteconfirm selection. That's lines 299-341 in the current version of Zen Cart.

Thanks again for your input,
Rethinking this, and provided that deleting customers is not an every day job, fortunately :wink:, i think i will look at creating a checkbox in the my account section.

Once the checkbox is checked & submitted it should send out an e-mail to the shop notifying that the customer requested for his account to be deleted.

That will provide for all the administrative functions to be handled from within the "my account" section and it will be very clear to the customer if he/she just opted out for the newsletter or if he/she asked to remove all their personal details releated to the account.

If anyone has done that allready that would be great, else i'll spend another evening constructing something like that. :smile:

Hallo and Happy New Year!

I am also interested in providing this facility to my customers. I have not found a solution yet, but I will be searching for it.

Kind regards,
orange_juice