feat(add delete customer endpoint): An endpoint that deletes a customer

[abmenzel]

Feature request

Add option to DELETE /admin/customers

Right now afaik there is no way to delete customers through the API.
I haven't found many discussions about this, but it seems like a pretty essential thing to have.

What is keeping us from adding this?

[BorisKamp]

+1 here

[pevey]

I think a potential blocker is what would happen to any orders, notifications, carts etc stored in other tables that are keyed to that customer.

One option would be to remove any identifying information (name, etc) and mark the customer as inactive.

But even that leaves the question of what to do with addresses. If you've sent an order to a customer, you need to keep that in your system for your records, so that you have information on where the order was shipped.

[BorisKamp]

Yeah makes sense! Is should be a soft delete and not a hard delete. And the soft delete should still keep the relations intact. It's an obligation in Europe to be able to delete a customer account due to the privacy laws so they should definitely make work of it.

[tsvetann]

I think a potential blocker is what would happen to any orders, notifications, carts etc stored in other tables that are keyed to that customer.

One option would be to remove any identifying information (name, etc) and mark the customer as inactive.

But even that leaves the question of what to do with addresses. If you've sent an order to a customer, you need to keep that in your system for your records, so that you have information on where the order was shipped.

I would propose both: deactivate and physically remove all user data (EU law)

[jarmovdh]

@MedusaNick any updates on this?

[hexrw]

👍 💯

Or at least let us delete manually created customers who have no activity...

[ElHawary-Ebutler]

I would suggest adding an archive, since we might need to revisit the deleted customer's info.

[KabyleBOT]

This is a real concerne in Europe

[jarmovdh]

@adevinwild any news on this topic?

[BorisKamp]

I've thought of a way we can do this ourselves at the moment, but Im not sure if this is the way to go (untill it is supported natively):

1. Create a custom DELETE route
2. Fetch the user using the customer repo and check if they have any relations to anything
3. When they have no relations, it's safe to delete the user: use the repo.delete method to delete the customer.
4. When they do have relations we do not want to delete the user. In this case we can use faker.js to anonymize the sensitive data so we can comply to the over-protective EU laws. For example, we call the repo.update method and change the first_name, last_name, email etc etc. We must also make sure to set the deleted_at field on the user, which is already in the table.

We end up with either a deleted user or a soft deleted user. I hope that if we set deleted_at the user does not end up in the backend UI and REST api endpoints. If it still shows up we have to manually add a status column to the customer table and filter based on that...

[adevinwild]

I've just read, I think it's a good idea, a lot of websites uses anonymization to handle GDPR, but how would you manage the different addresses? Do we just don't care about them and replace them too with faker ?

Anyway, for everyone, if you're interested I've been prototyping something that we can turn as a plugin, I don't know if it's something like this you imagined Boris, but it would be worthwhile to improve it if it's really useful to the community :

https://github.com/adevinwild/medusa-plugin-customer-anonymizer/blob/develop/src/services/anonymizer.ts

[TatianaKlimova91]

At the moment you can just mark customer as deleted through DB, just make request: UPDATE customer SET "deleted_at"='2024-05-27 22:20:17.699695+03' WHERE "email"='example@example.com'; the only action with deletion i found.