Customer management in Adobe Commerce, the platform formerly known as Magento, turns the store's user list into a commercial management tool. It lets you filter the base by country, group, company or sign-up date, save views for each area, apply bulk changes and export data, so the team serves each customer better and spends fewer hours on manual tasks.
On a Tuesday morning, the commercial director of a medical equipment distributor asks how many of her institutional customers opened an account in the online store during the last quarter and how many of them have already purchased. The answer she receives takes two days, because someone has to download a list, cross it with another and clean it by hand. Meanwhile, the service area receives calls from customers who do not remember their password, from others who need to change the company associated with their account and from one who complains that his discount was not applied. It all happens on the same administration screen that the team knows, but that very few use beyond searching for an email address.
This is the starting point of this article. A store that starts receiving orders also starts accumulating customer accounts, and each account brings questions about their data and their orders that the company must handle. Although customers can resolve many things on their own, they will always need assistance at different levels, from a password change to guidance during a purchase. The quality of that service, and the intelligence with which the information in the base is used, is a business decision before it is a technical one. Here we explain how to use the Adobe Commerce customer list with that approach, what can be done from the main menu and how to turn an administrative screen into a commercial advantage.
Two types of users with different needs coexist in Adobe Commerce. Admin users are the members of the team who operate the store, and their access is controlled through roles and permissions, a role-based access control (RBAC) scheme that defines what each person can see and modify. The official documentation explains that roles are created under System, Permissions, User Roles, with scope covering all stores or limited to some, and with resources assigned one by one. Customer users, by contrast, are the ones who buy, and they are managed from the Customers menu of the administration panel.
The user management this article refers to is the second kind. From the main customers menu you can reach three views: all users, the users who are online right now and the user groups. The first is the most used, because it is the list where you search, filter and act on each account, and the second lets you see who is browsing the store, valuable data for the service team during campaigns or launches. Customer groups, for their part, determine which discounts each customer can receive and which tax class applies to them, and they are used in pricing and promotion rules.
The separation matters because the two worlds carry different risks. A permission wrongly assigned to an administrator can expose sensitive information. Careless customer management erodes the experience and trust. The complementary article on managing each user in Adobe Commerce goes deeper into the individual customer record, while this one concentrates on the list and on what it allows you to do at scale.
Most companies use the customer list as an address book. They consult it when someone calls and set it aside the rest of the time. A more ambitious reading treats it as the first level of segmentation of the base, a space where business questions can be asked and answered in minutes. How many new accounts arrived this week from a specific country? Which customers belong to the wholesale group? Which ones have an incomplete tax identification number that will block invoicing? Each question, well resolved, saves time and prevents errors in the operation.
The value of personalizing the relationship is well documented. According to McKinsey research collected on its Brazilian site, 71% of consumers expect companies to offer personalized interactions and 76% are disappointed when that does not happen. That expectation is not met with sophisticated tools alone. It starts with having the base in order, knowing who is who and being able to act on groups of customers with clear criteria, which is exactly what the list offers when used methodically.
Imagine a pharmacy chain with an online store. Its loyalty team needs, every month, the list of new customers in a country, the list of those having birthdays and the list of those belonging to the affiliates group. With saved views, those three queries are resolved in seconds, and the marketing team spends its time designing the communication instead of building lists. The same happens at an insurer that sells products online or at a manufacturer that serves distributors. The order of the base is a silent competitive advantage.
Keyword search is the entry point. In it you type a name, an email or any other user field, and the system shows the matches. It also works with custom attributes created from the customer attributes section or through modules, which makes it possible to adapt the search to data specific to the business, such as an account code or a customer type.
When search is not enough, filters come in. Clicking the Filters button displays a set of criteria to refine the results. Among the most useful are the ID, the account creation date, the birthday, the email, the name, the customer group, the phone, the country, the state or province, the website the customer belongs to and the gender. The official documentation for the Adobe Commerce customer list confirms these dimensions and adds others, such as the company, the address or the account lock, which can be shown through the column settings.
A well-used filter solves concrete problems. A service team that needs to locate all the customers in a province to inform them of a logistics change does it in a minute. A finance area that must review accounts in a group with special tax treatment filters by group and reviews the tax data. And an eCommerce manager who wants to measure the effect of a campaign filters by account creation date and compares periods. What matters is that the filter is built once and not rebuilt, and that is where views come in.
Adjusting the columns lets you show only the information that really matters for a task. It is possible to remove fields such as country and province and add the company column, for example, so that a view shows customers by the company they belong to and not by their location. That decision, which seems minor, changes the usefulness of the list. A B2B account executive thinks in terms of companies, not people, and a view built to their measure saves them steps every day.
Adobe Commerce lets you save that combination of columns as a view and retrieve it later. According to the documentation on admin grid controls, you can save the current view, switch between saved views, rename or delete them, and restore the default view when needed. The same documentation warns that displaying many attributes can slow down the panel, one more reason to build small, purposeful views.
In practice, a mid-sized company usually ends up with four or five views. One by company for the B2B sales team, one with tax data for the billing area, one of new accounts for marketing and one for service with contact details. Creating and maintaining these views is an economical way to personalize eCommerce and to adjust it continuously to changes in the organization, with a time saving that accumulates every week across all colleagues.
Once the right customers are filtered and selected, the list allows you to apply actions individually or in bulk. Among those available are deleting accounts, subscribing or unsubscribing customers from a newsletter, assigning them to a customer group and editing their data inline. Bulk editing is especially useful when you need to correct a repeated data point across many accounts or reclassify a set of customers into another group, for example when a commercial agreement changes the conditions of a segment.
The golden rule is to filter first and act afterward. Before applying a bulk action it pays to check the number of selected records and confirm that they correspond exactly to what was intended, because an error in criteria is multiplied by each account. Deletion deserves special care. Before deleting accounts it is advisable to export the data and verify with the area responsible for personal data that there are no retention obligations. In group changes, it is useful to remember that the new group alters the price and the taxes the customer will see, so the action must be coordinated with whoever manages promotions.
Newsletter subscription requires an additional warning. These are communications that the customer must request on their own, because sending them without authorization can be considered spam and damage the sender's reputation. Mass-marking customers as subscribed without their consent is not a practice that a serious brand should tolerate, and it can also create legal problems under each country's data protection rules. Bulk action should be used to manage unsubscribes, corrections and subscriptions that already have backing, not to artificially expand a list.
Knowing customers and being able to use the data that describes them is necessary to give them a better experience and appropriate service. That is why the list lets you export the records, with the views and filters applied, in CSV or Excel XML format. The official documentation states that you select the records, choose the format in the export menu and the file downloads in the browser, using the current view of the grid as its basis.
The file downloads with a generic name, so it is recommended to add the export date to maintain traceability. Instead of keeping the original name, it pays to save it as users with the date, for example users_01-01-2023.csv, so that anyone knows what date the data is from. It seems like a small detail, but in companies where several versions of the same list circulate, a naming convention prevents decisions based on old information.
Exporting also brings a responsibility. A file with customer data is sensitive information and must be treated as such. It pays to define who can export through role permissions, store files in controlled locations and delete them when they are no longer needed. Data security does not depend only on the platform but on the team's habits, a matter covered in more detail in the article on essential cybersecurity for your Adobe Commerce store.
For whoever runs the business, customer management touches three fronts. The first is retention and loyalty. An orderly base makes it possible to recognize the best customers, assign them to groups with special conditions and make sure they receive the attention they expect. Making a customer feel special through pricing, content and service builds loyalty, and that loyalty is built with very concrete operational decisions, such as which groups exist and who can assign them.
The second is efficiency. Every hour a team spends assembling lists by hand is an hour it does not spend selling or serving. Saved views, bulk actions and orderly exports are small improvements that, multiplied by the number of people and weeks, represent a significant figure. An attentive leadership team should ask how much of the eCommerce team's time goes into preparing data and how much into using it.
The third is information governance. Who can view, modify, export and delete customer data is a decision that must be made with a risk criterion, not by default. At the same time, customer data is the input for the most profitable commercial strategies, from segmentation to group pricing policy. That is why customer management connects with the customer experience and commercial analysis work we develop with our clients.
A consultant experienced in these implementations would suggest spending an hour on a simple review. Open the customer list and ask yourself which five business questions the commercial area, service and leadership ask you most often. Build one view for each, with the necessary filters and columns, and give it a clear name that the team recognizes. Then check that the right people have access to those views and that those who do not need to export data do not have that permission.
In the second week, review data quality. Accounts without a company, without a country or with incomplete tax data are a constant source of errors in billing and shipping. Use the filters to find them, correct them in bulk where possible and define who is responsible for keeping the base clean. Finally, agree on a naming convention for exports and a retention policy for the files. With these three steps, a screen that almost nobody looked at becomes an everyday working tool.
ICX Consulting, a customer experience and commercial strategy consulting firm based in Miami, helps companies in the United States and Latin America turn their customer data into commercial decisions. We design the segmentation, customer groups and pricing and service rules that sustain the strategy, and then implement the operation on Adobe Commerce from our B2C eCommerce and B2B eCommerce practices. If you want to know how much value you are leaving in your customer base, request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant.
To move from the list to strategy, the ICX Persona Playbook Toolkit helps define the customer profiles that are then translated into groups, views and campaigns. If you want to see how the catalog those customers buy from is organized, see the guide on how to carry out the product upload process in Adobe Commerce.
The administrator is the one who operates the store from the panel and has permissions defined by a role. The customer is the one who buys, has an account in the store and is managed from the Customers menu. They are managed separately because their risk and purpose are different.
Yes. Adobe Commerce lets you save the column layout as a view and return to it when needed. It pays to name each view according to the task it solves and to limit the number of columns so the panel responds quickly.
Export from the list supports CSV and Excel XML, and uses the current view as its basis. It is advisable to add the date to the file name and protect the location where it is saved, because it contains personal data.
It is safe if you filter precisely before acting and coordinate with whoever manages promotions and taxes, because the group determines discounts and tax class. It is recommended to review the number of selected records and, for sensitive changes, to test first with a small group.
A well-managed customer base is not noticed when it works, but it is very noticeable when it does not. If your team spends more time preparing data than using it, talk to an ICX consultant and let us review together how to organize your base, your groups and your service processes so that every customer feels your company knows them.