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Change a Customer's Segment

In Short

Section titled “In Short”

A customer belongs to the segment they were created in and cannot be moved to another one. The options that remain are to create the customer again in the target segment — a brand-new customer, with none of the history behind them — or to leave the customer where they are and change what actually differs: the offer, the pricing, the discount.

How It Works

Section titled “How It Works”

A segment is a distribution channel, with its own catalogue, currency, pricing, emails and hosted pages. A customer, their subscriptions and their invoices all belong to the channel they were created in.

Each segment also has its own invoice numbering. An invoice is an accounting document issued inside a channel, under that channel’s numbering, so moving a customer would move issued invoices from one numbering to another and mix the two series. That is why the attachment is fixed when the customer is created and cannot be edited afterwards — neither the back office nor the API changes it.

A customer created again in another segment is a new customer. Nothing follows them across: subscriptions, invoices and payments all stay with the old customer, and the new one starts with an empty history.

The customer reference is unique across the whole business, not inside a single segment. The same reference cannot be carried by two customers, even in two different segments, so the new customer either takes a reference of their own or takes the old one once it has been freed.

The rule does not soften with volume: moving one customer and moving an entire customer base are the same operation, and neither is available.

Steps

Section titled “Steps”
  1. Decide which reference the new customer takes: a new one, or the reference the old customer carries today.
  2. Where the existing reference is to be reused, open the old customer, edit their Customer reference into a variant that marks it as retired — deleted-123456ABC for 123456ABC — and save. The reference 123456ABC is free from that point on.
  3. Open Subscribers → + → New customer, in the target segment, and fill in the customer details, including the reference decided in step 1.
  4. Save, then start the subscription on the new customer.
  5. Register the payment method again — it does not follow the customer.
  6. Open the old customer and interrupt their subscription with Actions → Interrupt.
  7. Keep the old customer: their history stays attached to them.

Specific Cases

Section titled “Specific Cases”
  • The old customer and their history. It remains, and it is meant to: an issued invoice is an accounting document, numbered inside its own segment, and cannot be moved or deleted because the customer was created again elsewhere. The same holds for the subscriptions and the payments recorded against them.
  • A reference an integration relies on. The customer reference is the key an application uses to reach a customer, so freeing it redirects that key: a call for 123456ABC reaches the new customer from then on, and the old one is only reachable under deleted-123456ABC.

See Also

Section titled “See Also”