Customer segmentation and CRM for an online store: groups, profiles

In short: customer segmentation splits your customers into groups that get different prices, messages or offers. In CloudCart you segment in two places: customer groups (Customers → Customer groups) decide prices and payment methods, and segments (Marketing → Segments) pick who gets a campaign from more than 60 conditions. Every customer has a profile with orders, addresses, payments and purchased products, so the admin covers the core jobs of an ecommerce CRM.

CloudCart is an ecommerce platform for stores selling across Europe. This guide walks through the customer list, the customer profile, customer groups, custom fields, segments, import and export, with the button names as they appear in the admin. It also covers what EU data protection law asks of you before a segment gets its first email. Wholesale prices for companies through groups are covered separately in the guide to B2B and wholesale online stores, and loyalty programs in the article on repeat purchases.

Customer segmentation and CRM: do you need separate software?

Most online stores do not need a separate CRM system, because customers, orders and marketing already live in the store admin. CRM (customer relationship management) is software that manages your relationship with current and future customers and connects sales, marketing and service. In an online store these three meet in one place: an order fills in the customer profile on its own, the customer's total spend is calculated automatically, and a campaign segment is built from the same data.

Customer segmentation is the part of CRM that sorts customers by what they have in common: where they live, what they buy, how often and how much. Common segmentation types in ecommerce are behavioural (orders, views, abandoned carts), value-based (spend, average order value), geographic (country, region) and declared data (what the customer tells you in a form). A separate CRM is worth it when you have sales reps who run meetings and quotes outside the website, or when you sell long-cycle projects.

CRM job	Where it is in CloudCart
Customer card: details, addresses, notes	Customers → the customer (profile with tabs)
Purchase and payment history	The Orders, Products and Payments tabs in the profile
Splitting customers by type	Customers → Customer groups, customer tags
Your own information about the customer	Customers → Custom fields
Campaigns to selected customers	Marketing → Segments and the campaigns in Marketing Suite
Customer reports	Reports → Customers (CC Pro and CC Master) and Analytics
Connection to other software	Admin API, webhooks when a customer is created, updated or deleted

Types of customer segmentation and where each one lives

Segmentation type	Example	Built with
By customer type	Retail, wholesale, VIP	Customer group
Geographic	Customers in Austria, customers in one region	Country and region filter, segment condition "Country"
Behavioural	Bought once, abandoned a cart, viewed a product 3 times	Segment conditions Order, Cart, View
Value (RFM)	High spenders, recent frequent buyers	Segment conditions Amount and Average, RFM condition on plans that include it
Declared	Skin type, business type, shoe size	Custom field, then a segment on its value
Team notes	"complaint", "influencer"	Customer tag

CRM or ERP: which does the store need?

CRM manages the relationship with the customer, while ERP (enterprise resource planning) manages stock, prices, suppliers and accounting. An online store usually needs both functions but not two new programs: customers and marketing are in the CloudCart admin, and the warehouse or ERP software connects to the store. Stock and prices come into the store, while online orders and new customers go back to the ERP. The ready-made connections are listed on the page on connecting the store to ERP and POS software.

Where is the customer list and what does it show?

The list of all customers is in the left menu → Customers. It includes everyone who has ordered, signed up or been added by hand. The number of customers is unlimited on every plan, as shown on the pricing page.

Each row shows name, email and group, the number of completed orders, total spend, the Virtual Wallet balance, date added, status and two switches: Marketing (marketing consent) and Active (active account). The switches save immediately. The "Completed orders" and "Total spend" columns sort, so your best customers come to the top with one click.

Above the list are seven filters: Active, Banned, Accept marketing, tag, customer group, country and region. They combine, and the filtered view stays in the page address, so you can bookmark it. For a store selling across the EU, the country filter is the quickest geographic segmentation there is: "Germany + Accept marketing" is one bookmark. Country and region are taken from the default shipping address. Search finds a customer by first name, last name, email and phone.

Bulk actions

Tick the customers and open Tools above the table. There you can ban (with a reason the customer sees), add tags, unban, change the group, send a password reset link and delete. The reset link is valid for 1 hour and is not sent to banned customers or to the "Guests" group. Deletion is permanent, and the deleted customer's orders stay in the store.

Where do I see a customer's order history?

The order history is in the customer profile: Customers → click the name → the Orders tab. The profile has up to eight tabs, and above them sit the customer value summary, the note, the tags and the default address with a map.

Profile tab	What it shows	When you need it
Overview	Six cards by status (completed, paid, cancelled, refunded, pending and failed orders) with count, products and amount, plus a pie chart	Whether the customer buys regularly or often cancels
Shipping addresses	Delivery addresses, with add and edit	The customer asks to change the address
Billing addresses	Invoice addresses with company details	A company wants the invoice under a different VAT number
Orders	All the customer's orders with 25 filters, including source and UTM	You are looking for the order the customer is asking about
Products	Every purchased product, line by line for each order, marked if bought on sale or with a discount	What to offer next time
Payments	Every payment: successful, failed, refunded, with provider and amount	The customer says they paid, but the order shows unpaid
Wallet	Balance and movements in the Virtual Wallet	A refund as credit, a gift card or a topped-up balance
Reviews	The customer's reviews (only with a reviews app installed)	Replying to a review or saying thanks

The Overview cards link straight to the Orders tab filtered by that status. Clicking an order opens it in a new browser tab. The Orders, Products and Payments tabs only display data: status changes, refunds and edits are made in the order itself. The order screens are described in the order management guide.

The customer note holds up to 191 characters and the customer never sees it. Examples: "Prefers parcel locker delivery" or "Company, pays by invoice within 14 days". The note, tags and group are visible as soon as you open the profile, so whoever answers the phone knows who they are talking to.

Logging in as the customer and changing the password

The login icon next to the name in the list opens the storefront in a new tab, logged in as that customer, with no confirmation step. You see their cart, discounts and account exactly as they do. The icon is missing for the "Guests" group. You set a specific password from the customer profile (Change password), while the bulk action in the list sends a reset link.

How do I create a customer group?

A customer group is created in Customers → Customer groups → + Add customer group, by entering only a name of up to 100 characters. Every customer belongs to exactly one group. New registrations join the "Default" group, and orders without registration go to "Guests". The two system groups cannot be deleted.

1. Open the groups screen. Customers → Customer groups. The top of the screen shows how many groups you have used from the plan limit, for example "2 of 5".
2. Create the group. + Add customer group → a name such as "VIP", "Wholesale" or "Salons". Names are unique regardless of upper or lower case.
3. Put customers in it. One customer: from the profile → edit → the Customer group field. Many customers: tick them in the list → Tools → Change customer's group. Customers get no email about the change.
4. Give it a purpose. A group changes nothing on its own. It takes effect when a discount, a cart rule (Cart Rules) or a segment points to it. Details are in the next section.
5. Check as the customer. Log in as one customer from the group using the login icon and look at the price and payment methods in the cart.

Plan	Customer groups in total	Your own groups (without the two system groups)
Baby Pack	none	0
Starter Pack	3	1
CC Pro	5	3
CC Master	100	98

The limits are from the pricing page. On Baby Pack the groups page does not open. The limit also applies to groups created through the API, and you can raise it with a higher plan or an add-on pack.

What can a customer group do?

A customer group decides four things: which discount the customer gets, which payment and shipping methods they see, which segments they fall into and how their sales are reported. The group itself stores only its name, and each of these actions is set up in the feature that points to the group.

• Price. A regular discount, a promo code or free shipping can apply only to selected groups. Example: a "Wholesale" group with 15% off the whole catalogue. All the types are in the guide to promo codes and discounts in CloudCart.
• Payment and shipping. A rule in Apps → Cart Rules with a group condition shows or hides a method. Example: bank transfer on invoice only for companies, card payment for everyone else.
• Marketing. A segment in Marketing → Segments can have the condition "Customer group = VIP", and the campaign goes to that segment.
• Reports. Reports → Customers (on CC Pro and CC Master) groups sales by customer group and by country, and the order list can also be filtered by group.

An order remembers the customer's group at the moment of purchase. If you move a customer to another group, their old orders are not recalculated, and the new price applies from the next order. How to build a full wholesale price list with groups and quantity tiers is covered in B2B online store: wholesale selling and on the Customers and B2B page.

Group, tag or segment

	Customer group	Tag	Segment
How many per customer	Exactly one	Many	Many
How it is assigned	By hand, by import or through the API	By hand, in bulk or through the API	Automatically, by conditions
Changes price and payment	Yes, through a discount and Cart Rules	No	No
Best for	Lasting splits: retail, wholesale, VIP	A note for the team: "complaint", "influencer"	A campaign: "no order in 90 days"

How do I add a field to the customer profile?

A new profile field is added in Customers → Custom fields → + Add custom field. The field appears at checkout and asks the customer for information that the standard name, email, phone and address do not cover. The number of fields is not limited by plan.

1. Pick the type. There are seven: dropdown, radio buttons, checkboxes, text field, text area, phone and URL. The type cannot be changed after creation, so choose carefully.
2. Give it two names. The internal name is for you, your filters and your segments. The storefront name is what the customer reads, and it is translated for every language of the store.
3. Add the values. For dropdowns, radio buttons and checkboxes enter the options, for example "Salon", "Freelance hairdresser", "End customer". Values within one field are unique.
4. Set the three switches. Active shows the field at checkout. Required blocks the order until the field is filled in. Allow customer to modify also shows the field in the customer's account on the storefront, so they can change it themselves.
5. Order the fields. Drag them in the list. The order in the list is the order the customer sees at checkout.

The answers appear on the customer card in the profile and can become a segment condition. Example from a cosmetics store: a "Skin type" field with the checkboxes "dry", "oily", "combination". A month later you have an "oily skin" segment and send a campaign only for those products. Fields have no conditional logic ("if A, show B") and no length or format checks apart from phone and URL.

Important: deleting a field also deletes all the customers' answers. If you no longer need the field at checkout, switch off Active: it disappears from the store and the answers stay.

How do I import and export customers (CSV and Excel)?

Customers are imported with the Import button and exported with Export customers at the top of the Customers list. Both are on every plan and ask for a two-factor authentication code, because they handle personal data.

1. Import, step 1. Upload the CSV file, mark whether the first row is a header and pick a group for all customers in the file, for example "Wholesale".
2. Import, step 2. Map each column to a customer field. Email is required, and a customer with an existing email is updated instead of duplicated.
3. Export. Apply the filters you need, for example "Customer group = VIP" and "Accept marketing = Yes", then click Export customers. The file is a CSV that opens in Excel and contains only the filtered customers. Large lists are prepared in the background.

When you switch platforms, you do not have to run the import yourself. In a migration the CloudCart team moves products and customers and keeps the order history while the old store keeps selling.

How do customer segments become email marketing?

Customer segments become campaigns in CloudCart's Marketing Suite: the segment is built from customer data, and the campaign goes out from the same admin by email, SMS, Viber or web push (SMS and Viber run on credits that are not included in the plans and are bought separately). You do not export lists to another tool, so the segment is always current.

How to create a segment

1. Open Marketing → Segments → Create segment. Start from scratch, describe the audience in a sentence with Generate with AI, or pick one of six templates: High Spenders, One-timers, Special product fans, Returning customers, Loyal customers and Cart abandoners.
2. Choose the type. One-time is a snapshot for a single send. Automated recalculates on its own as customers order, sign up or unsubscribe, which suits ongoing flows. The type cannot be changed later, and the plan sets how many Automated segments you can have.
3. Add up to 4 conditions. Conditions combine with AND. There are more than 60 of them, grouped by customer and group, custom field, country and region, orders and spend, average order value, cart and abandoned cart, viewed products and categories, wishlist, UTM source, shipping and payment method, discount used and tag.
4. Check who is in it. Click the subscriber count to see the list. The segment log shows who joined and left over time.
5. Attach a campaign. The campaign targets the segment, and only customers with marketing consent receive it.

Three segments that work from the first month: "VIP group, no order in 60 days", "bought once, more than 30 days ago" and "Skin type = dry" (or your own field). For a store selling into several EU countries add a fourth: "Country = Austria" combined with a product category, so each country gets its own campaign. Separate stores per country, each with its own language and currency, are covered in the guide to multilanguage, multicurrency and multistore selling. Sending step by step is in the email campaign guide for CloudCart, and ready-made scenarios are on the Campaigns page.

What EU law asks before the first email

A campaign email reaches only customers with Accept marketing switched on. The switch in the customer list also updates the subscriber record, and segments recalculate on their own. Consent is stored separately for each channel, and a customer who unsubscribes from a channel gets no campaigns through it. Three EU rules sit behind this:

• A legal basis. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, Regulation (EU) 2016/679) allows processing based on consent (Article 6(1)(a)), and the customer can withdraw consent at any time (Article 7(3)).
• Email consent and the existing-customer exception. The ePrivacy Directive 2002/58/EC requires prior consent for marketing email (Article 13(1)). A store that got the address through a sale may email the same customer about its own similar products, as long as an easy way to object is offered at collection and in every message (Article 13(2)). The directive is applied through national law, and some EU countries are stricter.
• The right to object and to erasure. A customer can object to direct marketing, including profiling linked to it, and then their data may no longer be used for it (GDPR Article 21). They can also ask for their data to be erased (Article 17). The Your Europe guide to GDPR for businesses sums up these duties in plain language.

In CloudCart, the GDPR app collects these requests from the storefront in Apps → GDPR → Requests: information, data download, deletion and marketing unsubscribe. You process each request on the customer record and mark it as done. Cookie banners and policies are covered in the guide to GDPR, cookies and the legal pages of an online store.

Customers with an AI assistant: metrics and tasks in one sentence

An AI assistant such as Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex, Gemini CLI or Cursor reads and changes customers through the CloudCart Admin API with a key from Settings → PAT tokens. For reports the customers:read permission is enough, and changing a group or tags needs customers. The customers permission also covers customer groups and subscribers.

Task	In the admin	With an AI assistant
Best customers	Sort by total spend, then open the profiles	"Show the 20 customers with the highest total spend, when they last ordered and which group they are in."
Lapsed customers	Export to CSV and filter in Excel	"Which customers with at least 3 completed orders have not ordered in 90 days?"
Repeat purchases	Analytics → new and returning customers	"What share of October's customers had ordered before?"
Regrouping	Tick row by row, then Tools	"Move everyone with total spend over €500 to the VIP group. Show me the list first."
Value by segment	By hand from the orders	"What is the average spend per customer in the Wholesale group and in the Default group, by country?"

The customer metrics come straight from the store, with no report to open: spend and order count per customer, date of the last order, share of returning customers, average value by group or country. The assistant does the maths and returns a table or a summary for the team. Ad spend is not in the store data, so the cost of a new customer also needs the ad account, and GA4 gives the full traffic picture. Which numbers to watch every week is in the guide to ecommerce KPIs with an AI agent.

Start with customers:read and ask the assistant to show which customers it will change before it changes them. Changes through the API follow the same rules and limits as the admin: the group limit applies, and a group change sends a webhook for the updated customer. How to create the key and which permissions to give is in the PAT token guide.

7 good practices for your customer base

1. Groups for price, tags for notes. A group changes price and payment, so keep it for lasting differences (retail, wholesale, VIP). Temporary markers ("complaint", "Christmas gift") are tags.
2. Name groups by meaning. "Wholesale 15%" tells the team more than "Group 2".
3. Write notes that help the next person. 191 characters are enough for "prefers parcel locker, pays by invoice".
4. Ask for little, but useful. One or two custom fields at checkout, only for data you will use in a segment or in service.
5. Check Overview before giving a discount. A customer with many cancelled or refunded orders is rarely a good VIP candidate.
6. Save filters as bookmarks. "VIP + Accept marketing" and "Wholesale + Germany" open with one click, because the filter is in the address.
7. Give permissions as needed. A moderator can be limited to customers from certain groups, and the Orders, Products and Payments tabs in the profile also need order permissions.

Mistakes to avoid

• Deleting instead of deactivating. A deleted customer cannot be restored. To stop logins only, switch off Active or ban the account.
• Deleting a custom field. You lose all answers. Switch off Active instead.
• The wrong field type. The type cannot be changed. If you need another, export the data, delete the field and create a new one.
• Expecting guest orders in the profile. An order without registration under the same email does not show in the registered customer's profile. Encourage registration or search by email in the order list.
• A group without a discount or rule. A group alone changes nothing in the store. Check by logging in as the customer.
• A campaign without consent. Do not email customers with Accept marketing switched off, and never include unsubscribed customers in any channel.
• Forgetting the system groups in the limit. On Starter Pack you have 1 group of your own, because "Default" and "Guests" take 2 of the 3 places.

CloudCart takes no percentage of sales on any plan, so more orders from returning customers do not raise the platform fee (0% commission on sales). Subscribers who have not bought yet and sign-up forms are covered on the Subscribers and segments page. Questions about your setup can go to support@cloudcart.com.

Frequently asked questions