Removing old customer accounts

[sally01]

We want to delete customer accounts that have not ordered from us in a while before exporting them to our new V16 website. Any ideas please.

[sally01]

Write some SQL maybe to update the customer database. Anybody done this before?

[Andy@codepath]

The SQL to remove the accounts is straightforward but the problem is that when deleting accounts normally (via the Sellerdeck application) it will not let you delete accounts which have orders allocated to them (even old ones).

Although deleting such accounts, and leaving the orders orphaned, may not cause a major problem - probably the associated orders would simply lose their account assignment - I would not recommend doing this as your Sellerdeck data would then be non-standard and may cause problems with any support issues in future.

The safe option would be to additionally delete the associated orders, or at least de-allocate them from the accounts which are to be deleted if you want to retain them, before deleting the actual accounts. The processes required to do that go a bit beyond what I would recommend doing without a solid understanding of the underlying data.

I'd be more than happy to provide this service for you, having done many similar tasks for our customers in the past. if you want to discuss this further and/or need any help transferring your data to your 2016 site, please contact me on andy@codepath.co.uk or 0161 870 6355.