See everything you know about a customer

An order tells you what someone bought once. The contact card tells you who they are: every order they have placed, what they have spent with you, what you have written about them, and a way through to their record in your store.

Opening it from an order

Go to Ecommerce › Orders and click the order.
In the Details card on the right, click Open contact.

The card opens over the order, so the line items stay where they were. Close it with the X or the Esc key and you are back on the order.

The button is there whenever the store gave you an email address for the buyer. If an order has none, there is nothing to look the person up by, so no button appears.

What is on it

Orders and spend: how many orders this person has placed and what they have spent in total, across every connected store and your invoicing, not just the order you came from.
Where you know them from: a badge for each system that has a record of them, such as Shopify, your mailbox, or Invoicing.
AI profile: a short summary of your email history with this person, the topics you discuss, and how you work together. Press Build profile the first time, and Regenerate later to bring it up to date.
Notes: anything you want to remember about them. Only you see these.
Their orders: the most recent orders with the date, the amount, what was in them, and where each one stands. One block per store, so if someone buys from both your Shopify and your WooCommerce store you get both, each headed with the store it came from. Nothing is merged: an order always says which shop it was placed in.
View in Shopify / View in WooCommerce: opens this customer in that store's own admin in a new tab.
View ecommerce customer: goes to Ecommerce › Customers filtered to this person, which is the sales analysis view rather than the contact record.

The same card, in two places

This is one contact record shown in two places, not two copies. Contacts opens the same card, and so does a customer row on Ecommerce › Customers. A note you write from an order is there the next time you open the person from Contacts, and a profile you build on the Contacts page is already built when you open them from an order.

A first-time buyer

Someone who has just placed their first order, or who checked out as a guest, may not have a customer record in your store yet. The card still opens: it shows the order you came from and lets you write notes or build a profile. The lifetime totals fill in once the store has recorded them.

Guest checkouts in WooCommerce

WooCommerce only creates an account for someone who signs up. A guest who checked out without one has orders but no account, so their block lists the orders and offers no View in WooCommerce link: there is no customer page in your store to open. Open the order itself in WooCommerce if you need the full detail.

Two guest orders from the same person are two separate records in WooCommerce, so they may show as two people here until that person creates an account.

What the numbers are not

Orders and spend on this card are a running total of what your stores and invoicing have captured for that email address. They are a customer relationship figure, not an accounting one: they carry no tie-out, they are not filtered by the period selector, and they will not match a sales report. For a figure you report or file, use the reports.

One consequence worth knowing: someone who has ordered under two different email addresses is two customers here, because the address is what ties the records together.