European privacy policy

According to the new European privacy policy, customer data must not be stored any longer than necessary. During our checkout process, customer and order data is collected to generate an email.

My question. Is it possible to erase the data once it was processed?

Or is it even possible to only delete customer data like name, address etc.

Of course. You could create a page to delete or remove sensitive data in your admin. You could add a button "order processed" to your admin and have it delete or update the record once pressed.

Thank you Ray for responding. Instead of recording customer data in the database, could the shop work with only variables or data stored in sessions?

There is one chunk of code on the confirm page after // WA eCart Store Cart Summary in Db

I commented out that code hoping it would not store any customer data in the database, but that produced a blank checkout success page. The error codes didn't help me any.

So my question, is it possible to skip recording any customer data in the database?

When you run the eCart wizard there is an option to not store anything in the database. If you already have the site running you should be able to remove the Store Cart Summary in Database and Store Cart Details in Database code from that page. It probably broke because you didn't remove both.

The site has been running for a long time. New privacy laws make it necessary to not store personal data in the database. The order details are fine, the order summary (containing personal data) has to go.

Once I comment out the store in db, even for both summary and details (we have two details, one for orders, one for quotes), the page will not go on to the success page. That is not surprising, since the redirect is located in the store in db code.

Another problem is, that Universal Email is pulling the order number from the db. But I guess that can be changed.

I then tried changing the eCart Object, but there is no option not to store in db. Maybe because I am still running version 5?

What would you suggest I do from here?

The cart object doesn't have anything to do with the storing of the cart.... That can be done or not with any cart object.

If you remove the store cart summary and store cart details in database, then you can add the redirect to the email code instead.

Also you could use the session_id() instead of the order id from the database to save the order.

Order Details wouldn't work because there is a required field to store the orderID that isn't getting generated, so there would be no way to pair a detail to an order.

I ran into a problem, when completely removing the store in db. Of course there was no longer an orderID.

The solution that works for me was to remove all customer related field names from this part of code:
$WA_fieldNamesStr = "language_id|OrderReferenceID|OrderShipping|OrderTax|OrderTotal|OrderDate";

The field names I deleted just stay empty in the data base. Not the best solution, but it works for me.

Additional info: the wizard did not work for me, because it did not recognize the checkout button. And the email is triggered on the success page. So I couldn't use it to redirect to the success page.

Thank you for your help though. I am glad it is working now.