The sense and nonsense of the guest account

The GDPR bureaucracy monster has struck again - and not for the first time!

The EU is famous and notorious for its completely superfluous and sometimes contradictory regulations. Now there is a new one that makes life difficult for retailers and basically takes customers for fools.

You can read about it here: Online retailers must allow guest orders (onlinehaendler-news.de)

Explanation:

When placing an order, you can choose whether or not to create a customer account. If you don't create one, this is for data protection purposes. Or like this. Today is 30 April 2022 and not the 1st, but in principle this statement published by the government is nothing more than an April Fool's joke.

The facts:

According to financial accounting laws, every retailer must keep all sales data for 10 years, including customer data!
Any retailer, lawyer, judge or politician who claims the opposite either has too little specialist knowledge, popularly known as stupidity, or is deliberately lying to buyers.

If you create a customer account with us, this will result in

• your data will be stored in the shop and in our accounts department
• you can take advantage of the loyalty discount, which increases with every purchase and every turnover
• you can track your consignments in your customer account
• you only have to enter your password the next time you place an order (or quickly request a new one via a link), all the data is already there
• that you can also participate in partner programmes etc. with us
• that you can also see what you have ordered and when at any time in the future or download saved documents

If you click on "do not create a customer account" (or use Paypal Express instead of Paypal), this will result in

• your data will be stored in our accounts department for 10 years, as required by law
• you create a "guest account" where you cannot log in a second time. We will delete this after a few weeks when the purchase has been safely completed.
• That's it for "advantages"..

For us, it also means that the workload increases, we first have to search in the accounting department to see if the customer already exists, we have to keep correcting customer numbers ... Time is money and if our bureaucracy increases, price increases are more likely in the future, as we also have to pay the employees somehow.

We had blocked the "guest account" function for a few months and both we and the customers had no problem with it and had very good experiences.
We will now reactivate the option "do not create a customer account" due to pressure from EU legislation. We are well aware that we are lying to our customers, or rather that is not entirely correct, we are not lying to anyone, we are simply passing on the EU's data protection lies in response to legal pressure!

Incidentally, this is not our private problem or you have achieved nothing if you think you are better off shopping elsewhere.
This problem affects every shop, including Amazon, which is so popular with customers.
The problem with the guest account is hidden behind such flowery terms as "quick order account" or "one-click order", but basically means the same thing.

If you really want to save data, here is our tip on how you can achieve this:

Firstly, order using the "Create customer account" function. This is automatic, simply do not tick the "Do not create a customer account" box.
Once you have received the goods and are sure that everything is fine and no more enquiries are necessary and you do not want to order anything else in the future: Let us know that you want us to delete it.
However, we can only delete the account with everything that has been entered. The orders and invoices themselves, which still contain the name and address, must be archived for 10 years in accordance with the law.

This is the only way you can be sure that all unwanted data will disappear - with us as with any other shop!

With a guest account, you can no longer log in afterwards, so you have no control over whether the shop operator deletes your data or simply keeps it indefinitely!