The sense and nonsense of the guest account

The bureaucratic monster that is the GDPR has struck again – and not for the first time!

The EU is both famous and notorious for its completely unnecessary and, in some cases, contradictory regulations. Now there’s a new one that’s making life difficult for retailers and, in effect, taking customers for fools.

Read more here: Online retailers must allow guest orders (onlinehaendler-news.de)

To explain:

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 something like that. Admittedly, today is 30 April 2022 and not the 1st, but in principle this statement, published by the government, is no more credible than an April Fool’s joke.

The facts:

According to financial accounting laws, every retailer must retain all sales data for 10 years – including customer data!
Any retailer, lawyer, judge or politician who claims otherwise either lacks specialist knowledge – commonly known as stupidity – or is deliberately lying to buyers.

If you create a customer account with us, this means

• your data is stored in the shop and in our accounts
• that you can take advantage of the loyalty discount, which increases with every purchase and with every transaction
• that you can track your parcels via your customer account
• that on your next order, you’ll only need to enter your password (or quickly request a new one via a link); all your details will already be on file
• that you can also take part in our affiliate programmes, etc.
• that you’ll always be able to see what you’ve ordered and when, and download any saved 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 accounts for 10 years, as required by law
• that you will create a ‘guest account’, but you will not be able to log in to it a second time. We will delete this after a few weeks, once the purchase has been successfully completed.
• So much for the ‘benefits’…

For us, it also means an increased workload: we first have to check our accounts to see if the customer already exists, and we constantly have to correct customer numbers… Time is money, and if our administrative burden keeps increasing, price rises are more likely in the future, as we have to pay our staff somehow.

We had disabled the ‘guest account’ feature for a few months, and neither we nor our customers had any problems with this; in fact, our experience was very positive.
Now, under pressure from EU case law, we’re going to reactivate the option to ‘not create a customer account’. We’re well aware that by doing so we’re lying to our customers – or rather, that’s not entirely correct: we’re not lying to anyone, but we’re simply passing on the EU’s data protection lies under legal pressure!

Incidentally, this isn’t just our own problem, and thinking that you’re better off shopping elsewhere won’t achieve anything.
This problem affects every online shop, including Amazon, which is so popular with customers.
It’s just that customers aren’t told about it there… The issue with guest accounts is hidden behind flowery terms such as ‘Express Order Account’ or ‘One-Click Order’, but essentially it means the same thing.

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

Start by placing your order using the ‘Create a customer account’ option. This happens automatically; you simply mustn’t tick the ‘Do not create a customer account’ box.
Once you’ve received the goods and are sure that everything is in order, that no further enquiries are needed, and that you don’t intend to place any more orders in future, simply let us know that you’d like us to delete the account.
However, we can only delete the account along with all the information entered there. The orders and invoices themselves, which still contain your name and address, must be archived for 10 years by law.

This is the only way you can be sure that all unwanted data will be deleted – with us, just as with any other shop!

With a guest account, you won’t be able to log in again afterwards, so you’ll have no control over whether the shop operator deletes your data or simply keeps it indefinitely!