Help · Audience

Deleting profiles

You can delete people: one at a time from a profile's own page, or everybody in a segment or a list at once from Settings. The usual reason is bots — the checkouts that were never shoppers, which the built-in segment Suspected bots exists to catch. Another is a list of people you should never have imported.

There is no undo. Nothing is moved to a bin and nothing can be brought back, by you or by us.

Who can do it

Only the store's owner. Everybody else on your team sees the profile page without the button, and the Settings row marked Owner only, with:

Only the store’s owner can delete profiles.

Nobody at Carpe Messaging can delete your people for you, whatever access we have while we are helping you. The press is yours.

One profile at a time

Open the profile and press Delete this profile, in its own box at the foot of the page. The confirmation names the person and says, in full:

This deletes their history, their consent and everything we hold about them, their opens and clicks included. The record that a campaign was delivered to them stays — counted, never named. If they are also a customer in your store who has never placed an order, they are deleted there too; a customer who has placed an order stays in your store — and this screen does not show what your store answered, so check your store’s own admin if it matters. There is no undo.

Press Delete profile and you are taken back to the profiles screen. The person is no longer on it.

Under it is a box, Never let this address back, which starts unticked. Tick it when you know the person is not a real shopper and you never want their address or phone number to reach you again — see "If they come back", below.

There is nothing to type for one profile. You are looking at the person you are deleting, and the question names them.

A segment or a list at a time

Go to Settings → Delete profiles and press Choose….

1. Pick a segment or a list. Both are in the one menu, each marked "(segment)" or "(list)". When your store has Suspected bots, it is first in the menu and already chosen.
2. Read the count. The number is counted again the moment you choose, so it is this minute's and never last week's. It comes with the warning — for example You are deleting 4,912 profiles. There is no undo. — and a sentence saying how many of those people are customers in your store (see "In your Shopify store", below).
3. Decide whether they can come back. The box Never let these addresses back is already ticked when you chose Suspected bots, and unticked for anything else. Change it if you want to — see "If they come back", below.
4. Type the name exactly — the segment's or the list's name, character for character. Delete profiles stays unavailable until it matches.
5. Press Delete profiles. The deletion runs on its own, and you can leave the page.

If the number changed while you were deciding — somebody joined the segment, or left it — nothing is deleted. You are shown the new number and asked to confirm again. The same happens if the number is unchanged but the people are not — somebody edited the segment's rule or the list, or people moved in and out of it on their own. The people deleted are exactly the people you confirmed, taken at the moment you pressed: somebody who joins the segment a minute later is not deleted, and somebody who leaves it a minute later still is.

A count may not be available. If another count is already running for your store, or the segment takes too long to count, the dialog says so and offers nothing to confirm. Try again in a moment. A segment or a list with nobody in it has nothing to delete, and the dialog says that too.

A segment an import left unfinished is refused. When a segment arrived from another tool with a rule we could not carry over, it can match more people than it was meant to, and this is not an act to take on a guess. The dialog says:

An import left a rule out of this segment, so it may match more people than you meant. Finish the rule before deleting its profiles.

One deletion at a time. While one is running, the row reads Deleting now, the progress line counts how many are done so far, and a second one cannot be started:

A deletion is already running. You can start another when it finishes.

When it is done, the row on the Settings page says so — the last deletion's name, how many profiles were deleted and when, and what happened in your store. When we can email you, the confirmation after you press says We will email you when it is done, and we do: the person who pressed it gets the same numbers by email.

If a deletion stops part of the way through, the row says how far it got. Everyone it reached is deleted; everyone else is still here.

What happens to the segment or the list

The segment stays, and reads 0. Its rule and its name are untouched — deleting its people is not deleting the segment. Anybody who matches the rule later is in it again, which is the point of a rule like Suspected bots.

The list is emptied, never deleted. It keeps its name and reads 0, ready to use again.

What goes, and what stays

Everything we hold about the person goes: their address, name and phone number, anything your store told us about them, everything they did and looked at, their consent and the record of how it was given, any pause you set, every open and click, and their place on every list. It is the same erasure that runs when somebody asks your store to be forgotten.

What stays is the record that a campaign was delivered to them — counted, never named. A campaign still reports how many it sent and delivered, with the people you deleted in those numbers. Their opens and clicks do not stay: they are part of what we hold about the person, so they are deleted with everything else, and a campaign's opens and clicks go down by theirs — as does anything counted from them, such as sales from a click in the email. Nobody can be recovered from what stays.

They leave every list, every segment and every back-in-stock request, and the profiles screen no longer shows them. An export never contains them. Where a past send still has to be shown — a sent, delivered or refused email in a metric's activity or on the refusals screen — the person reads Redacted profile, with no link, no address and no subject line.

If they come back

If you ticked Never let these addresses back, they are kept out for good. Every email address of every person you deleted, and every phone number only they used, keeps a one-way fingerprint that says it must never be messaged from your store — whatever they were before. A banned address never comes back as a profile. If it turns up again — in an order, a checkout, a signup form, a back-in-stock request, an import or anything your own systems send us — we do not make a profile for it at all, so it never appears in your profiles, your lists, your segments or your counts. Nothing tells the person they were kept out. On a signup form they are thanked like anybody else, but they never get a discount code: a form with a discount shows them the same ending it shows when a code cannot be handed out right now, and a form that asks for a phone number texts them no code.

If it shows up in your Shopify store again as a customer with no orders, we delete that customer there again, automatically. We try at most once a day for each customer, so a bot that keeps checking out cannot flood your store with requests. A customer who has placed an order is left alone in your store — Shopify keeps the order history — and still never becomes a profile here.

This holds whatever the person was before. Somebody who had already unsubscribed, or whose address was already on Do not email, keeps that record too — and is kept out all the same.

This cannot be undone, by you or by us, so the box is ticked for you only for Suspected bots. The confirmation says:

When this is ticked, their email addresses and phone numbers can never be emailed or texted from your store again — even if they sign up, order or are imported later. They never appear in your profiles again, and if they turn up in your store as a customer with no orders, they are deleted there again. A phone number somebody else in your store still uses stays open for them. This cannot be undone. Leave it unticked and a real person who comes back can be contacted again once they say yes — anyone who had unsubscribed stays unsubscribed.

With the box left unticked, the rest of this section is what happens.

Somebody who unsubscribed, or whose address is in Do not email, stays that way. Deleting them keeps one thing on purpose: a one-way fingerprint of the address, or of their phone number for texts, saying it must never be messaged again. It cannot be read back into an address. If the same person turns up again tomorrow — in an order, a signup or an import — they are a new profile, and still nothing you send reaches them. Deleting somebody is never a way to undo their "no".

Anybody else can come back and be emailed again. A person who was subscribed, or who was never asked, leaves nothing behind that stops them coming back. We keep only a one-way fingerprint of their address — it cannot be read back into an address — so we can recognize your store's own deletion echoing back from Shopify within 30 days, and it bans nobody. If they return, they are a new profile with nothing held against them, and whether you can email them follows their consent from that point, exactly as for anybody new. This is deliberate: deleting somebody who was subscribed, by mistake, should not ban them from your store for ever.

A bot that comes back is a new profile, and is treated like one. If it only turns up on your storefront, it reads Not confirmed yet: like every profile nothing from your store has confirmed, it is left out of every count and every audience and is never emailed. If it runs another checkout, your store's own record confirms it again, Suspected bots catches it again, and you can delete it again. The segment is the standing net; deleting is the broom.

In your Shopify store

When you delete somebody here, we look for them in your store as well.

A customer in your store who has never placed an order is deleted from your store too. They are gone from your Shopify admin's customers, not only from here. For a bot sweep, this is what clears the fake customers out of your store as well as out of your audience.

A customer who has placed an order stays in your store. We check before we ask your store to delete anybody, and anybody with even one order is left exactly as they are. Their orders are your store's own sales record, and that record is not ours to destroy. The profile here is still deleted.

Nothing is deleted in your store for somebody who is not a customer there — a person known here only from a form, an import or their browsing, with no customer record in your store. There is nothing of theirs there to delete.

The dialog tells you before you press. For a segment or a list, the count comes with a sentence saying how many of the people are customers in your store; when none are, it says:

None of them is a customer in your store, so nothing is deleted there.

The Settings row, when it is done, says how many customers were deleted in your store, how many were kept because they had placed an order, and how many we could not confirm were deleted there — for example In your store, 300 customers were deleted and 12 were kept because they have placed an order. The email, when one is sent, says the same. Deleting one profile from its own page sends no email and the screen does not say what happened in your store — the confirmation says so before you press — so your Shopify admin is where to look if it matters.

If your store does not confirm the delete, the deletion here still happens. Your store is a separate system: it may be briefly unavailable, the app's access to it may have lapsed, or it may not find or delete that customer. The person is deleted here anyway — you asked us to delete what we hold. If our request was cut off before your store answered, we send it again within a few minutes. Once your store has answered, we never ask it to delete that customer again; the only thing we may still retry is passing on an unsubscribe your store had not yet heard about. For a segment or a list, the Settings row says how many customers we could not confirm were deleted there. Check them in your Shopify admin, under Customers, and delete any that are still there.

A deletion in your store is the same as one you make there yourself, so your store may later send the app its own request to forget the same person. That is our own deletion coming back: when it arrives within 30 days of yours, it does not put the address on Do not email, and somebody you left free stays free. The same is true of a customer your store kept because they had placed an order: somebody you left free stays free. Somebody you deleted with Never let these addresses back ticked was never left free, so nothing changes for them.