Accounts and Privacy Settings

Clicking on the Accounts and Privacy tab at the top of the WooCommerce > Settings page takes you to the accounts and privacy Settings.

These settings are where you can enable or disable guest checkout, control customer account creation, decide how personal data is retained or removed from your shop, and set your privacy policy notices. Sections include:

• Guest Checkout and Accounts
• Privacy Policy
• Personal Data Retention

Additionally, we share information about what WooCommerce adds to the WordPress Personal Data Exporter tool.

Guest Checkout

• Allow customers to place orders without an account — Allows customers to check out without creating an account or being logged in. Guest orders will not be tied to a user account in WordPress.
• Allow customers to log into an existing account during checkout — This displays a login form and prompt on the checkout page if the customer is not already logged in.

Account Creation

• Allow customers to create an account during checkout
• Allow customers to create an account on the My Account page
• Automatically generate username from customer email — If this setting is disabled, there will be an input box for the user to enter their own username.
• Automatically generate customer password — If this is disabled, there will be an input box for the user to set their own password. Note that while the password strength notification will be displayed at Checkout, customers can choose any password to not limit conversions. For accounts created on the My Account page, the password will need to meet certain strength requirements (i.e., a combination of the number of characters and a mixture of uppercase/lowercase / numeric / symbol characters).
• Allow customers to create an account after checkout — This option allows account creation on the order confirmation page after a customer has checked out as a guest. If guest checkout is disabled, or you’re not using a block-based theme or the block checkout, this option will not be available.
• Allow customers to create an account during checkout — This will allow account creation on the checkout order, so a customer account is created when the order is placed.

Account erasure requests

• Remove personal data from orders — WordPress 4.9 allows you to remove personal data on request. When doing this, if you enable this option, user data will also be removed from your orders if they belong to the user being erased.
• Remove access to downloads — WordPress 4.9 allows you to remove personal data on request. When doing this, if you enable this option, download data will also be removed if it belongs to the user being erased. The erased user will no longer have access to any purchased downloads if this happens.

Personal data removal

• Allow personal data to be removed in bulk from orders — Adds a new bulk action to remove personal data on the Orders page. Useful if you need to manually anonymize orders in bulk. See more about this feature at Managing Orders: Removing Personal Data from Orders.

This section lets you select a page for your privacy policy, and display privacy policy snippets on your account and checkout pages shown to customers.

• Privacy Page — This link takes you to Settings > Privacy, where you can select a page to act as your privacy policy. Using [privacy_policy] in the two notices below will link to this page. Some themes also use this option to link to a privacy policy in other places, such as the footer.
• Registration privacy policy — Shown on the registration form on the My Account page. You should include information about your privacy policy, and link to your page privacy policy page for more information.
• Checkout privacy policy — Shown on the checkout form. You should include information about your privacy policy, and link to your page privacy policy page for more information.

This section allows you to decide how long to keep order data on your store. You should specify how long your site will retain data in your privacy policy; consider what makes sense for local laws, such as the EU GDPR.

For each option, enter a number and choose the duration from days, weeks, months, or years. Leaving these options blank will retain that data indefinitely.

• Retain inactive accounts — Inactive accounts are accounts which have not logged in nor placed an order for the specified duration.
• Retain pending orders — Pending orders are unpaid or abandoned and should not need to be fulfilled.
• Retain failed orders — Failed orders are unpaid or abandoned and should not need to be fulfilled.
• Retain cancelled orders — Cancelled orders were orders cancelled on purpose by either the admin or the customer, or timed out waiting for payment.
• Retain completed orders — Completed orders were fulfilled in the past.

If enabled, this cleanup will run via a daily cron job. Inactive accounts are tracked using anonymous metadata, and only subscriber/customer accounts are removed.

• Failed, pending, and canceled orders which get cleaned up will be moved to the trash.
• Completed orders which get cleaned up will be anonymized so sales stats are unaffected.
• Inactive accounts will be deleted. An inactive account is one which has not been logged in to, or which has not placed orders, for the specified time.

WordPress 4.9.6 added the ability to export personal data associated with an email address to an HTML file. You can export personal data from your site at Tools > Export Personal Data. While these exports are not a WooCommerce feature, WooCommerce adds data to the generated export file, exporting the following data:

• Customer address/account information
• Orders associated with the given email address
• Download permissions and logs associated with the given email address

To ensure requests are genuine, a confirmation email is sent to verify the request. The verification process:

1. Enter an email address or username.
2. User is notified via email with a confirmation link.
3. Confirmation link is used, and request is marked “confirmed.”
4. Email with link to download their personal data is then sent to the user.

Here’s an example of a Personal Data File:

Do you still have questions and need assistance? 

• If you’re looking to extend the core functionality shown here, we recommend reviewing available extensions in the WooCommerce Marketplace.
• Need ongoing advanced support or a customization built for WooCommerce? Hire a Woo Agency Partner.
• Are you a developer building your own WooCommerce integration or extension? Check our Developer Resources.

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