The sense and nonsense of the guest account

The bureaucracy monster DSVGO has struck again – not for the first time!

The EU is renowned and notorious for its completely superfluous and sometimes contradictory regulations. Now there is a new one that makes life difficult for retailers and basically treats customers as if they were fools.

Read about it here: Online merchants must allow guest orders (onlinehaendler-news.de)

To explain:

When ordering you can choose whether or not to create a customer account. If you do not create one, that is supposed to serve data protection. Or something like that. Although today is 30 April 2022 and not the 1st, in principle this statement published by the government is worth no more than an April Fool’s joke.

The facts:

According to financial accounting laws, every retailer must keep all data relating to sales for 10 years, which therefore also includes customer data!
Any retailer, lawyer, judge or politician who claims otherwise either has too little specialist knowledge — commonly called stupidity — or is deliberately lying to buyers.

If you create a customer account with us, this means

• that your data will be stored in the shop and in our accounting records
• that you can use the loyalty discount, which increases with every purchase and every turnover
• that you can track your shipments in your customer account
• that for your next order you only need to enter your password (or quickly request a new one via a link), all data is already available
• that you can also participate in partner programmes etc. with us
• that you can at any time in the future see what you ordered and when, or download stored documents

If you click on “do not create a customer account” (or use PayPal Express instead of PayPal), this means

• that your data will be stored in our accounting records for 10 years, as legally required
• that you create a “guest account”, but you cannot log in to it a second time. We delete this after a few weeks, once the purchase is definitely completed.
• That’s it for “advantages”…

For us it also means that the workload increases: we first have to search in the accounting whether the customer already exists, we constantly have to correct customer numbers … Time is money and if our bureaucratic workload keeps rising, price increases will become more likely in future, since we also have to pay our employees somehow.

We had disabled the “guest account” function for several months and neither we nor the customers had a problem with it and had very good experiences.
Now, under pressure from EU legal requirements, we will reactivate the option “do not create a customer account”. Fully aware that by doing so we are deceiving customers, or rather that is not quite correct — we are not deceiving anyone, but under legal pressure we are merely passing on the EU’s data-protection lies!

By the way, this is not just our private problem and you haven’t achieved anything if you think “then it’s better to shop elsewhere”.
This problem affects every shop, including the ever-popular Amazon among customers.
There it is simply not communicated to customers in this way … The guest account problem hides behind flowery terms such as “quick-order account” or “one-click ordering”, but basically means the same thing.

If you really want to minimise the data collected, here’s our tip on how you can achieve that:

First order using the “create a customer account” function. This happens automatically — simply do not tick the box “do not create a customer account”.
If you then receive the goods and are sure that everything is fine and no further queries are necessary and you do not want to order anything in future: tell us that we should delete it.
However, we can only delete the account with everything that was entered. The orders and invoices themselves, which still contain name and address, must by law be archived for 10 years.

Only in this way can you be sure that all unwanted data disappears — with us as with any other shop!

With a guest account you cannot log in afterwards, so you also have no control over whether the shop operator deletes your data or simply keeps it indefinitely!