Customer Segments

Customers are part of customer segments. Customer segments aggregate subsets of customers according to well-defined criteria. For example, a customer segment could aggregate all customers who spend more than a certain amount of money per year.

Intershop Commerce Management enables customer segments based on customer segmentation services. This allows, for example, external systems to "push" customer segments into Intershop Commerce Management. Integrating customer segmentation services relies on Intershop Commerce Management's managed services interface, see Services: Concepts.

By default, Intershop Commerce Management incorporates a standard customer segmentation service that provides for assigning existing customer segments as target groups to various business objects like promotions, price lists, etc. Other custom or third-party customer segmentation services, which may add specific segmentation functionality and new segments, can be implemented on a project-specific base. In this case, you must create and manage individual service configurations for these services. If you enable multiple customer segmentation services, all customer segments provided by each of them are available as a combined result.

Note: Locally creating customer segments and managing associated customers does not depend on an enabled service. At least one working customer segmentation service, however, is required for assigning customer segments as target groups to other business objects.

Customer segments come in two types:

  • Implicit customer segments

    Implicit customer segments are predefined and cannot be deleted. Customers are assigned to and removed from these customer segments automatically.

  • Custom customer segments

    Custom customer segments are additional customer segments created by a channel administrator.

Implicit customer segments include:

Table 1. Implicit Customer Segments
Customer Segment Description
Everyone All customers.
Individual Customers All individual customers. Customers are automatically assigned to this customer segment based on their customer type.
New Customers All registered customers before they place their second order. Upon registration, customers are automatically assigned to the segment New Customers. Once registered customers have placed their first order, return to the storefront in a different session and log on again (i.e., are identified by the system as registered user), they are removed from this segment and assigned to Recurring Customers.
Recurring Customers All registered customers once they have placed their first order, return to the storefront in a different session and log on again (i.e., are identified by the system as registered user).
Registered Customers All customers who have registered and can be identified by the system as registered users.
SMB Customers All small and medium business customers. Customers are automatically assigned to this customer segment based on their customer type.
Unregistered Customers All customers who have not registered yet or cannot be identified by the system as registered users.

For example, a user entering the sales channel storefront for the first time is automatically assigned to the customer segments Everyone and Unregistered Customers. When registering, the customer is automatically assigned to Everyone, Registered Customers, and New Customers. Once the customer has placed an order, returns to the storefront in a different session and logs on again, the customer is part of Everyone, Registered Customers, and Recurring Customers.

For details about managing service configurations, including customer segmentation services, see Services Management.

For details about managing customer segments, see Customer Segment Management.