GUIDE

DTC customer data audit checklist

This is the working checklist behind our data audit. It is deliberately boring. Most retention problems are identity problems wearing a campaign costume.

Written by Jaume RosReviewed by Jaume Ros, Loiale teamLast updated 2026-08-05

1. Identity

  • Is there a single customer identifier that survives across commerce, ESP, support and, where relevant, POS?
  • How are guest checkouts resolved to known customers?
  • What happens when a customer uses a second email address?
  • Which system is the declared source of truth, and does everything actually defer to it?

2. Events

  • Which behavioural events are captured today, and which are captured but never used?
  • Are product and variant attributes attached to purchase events?
  • Is browse and cart behaviour tied to the customer record or only to a session?
  • Are returns, refunds and exchanges represented at all?

3. Zero-party data

  • What has the customer told you directly: preferences, sizes, occasion, replenishment cycle?
  • Where is it captured, and does it reach the segmentation layer?
  • Is anything captured that no downstream system can read?

4. Consent and governance

  • Is consent state stored per channel and per region?
  • Can a suppression decision be reconstructed after the fact?
  • Who can change segmentation logic, and is that change recorded?

5. Destinations

  • Which tools can act on the profile today, and which only receive a subset?
  • Where does data flow one way when it should flow both?
  • What breaks silently, and how would you know?

6. The questions the data must answer

  • Which customers are on a path to a second order, and which have stalled?
  • What does a customer prefer, beyond what they bought once?
  • Which cohort is worth spending margin on?
  • Which lifecycle moment is underperforming right now?
KEEP READING

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