Best Practices for Archiving Orders

[oliverands]

Back in the day, before I started using MivaPay, I would archive payment information on orders older than 90 days every month so that the payment data was no longer held on my server. Now with MivaPay and credit cards not touching the server any longer, I don't archive orders each month as part of my monthly close.

I'm wondering what the recommended best practice is for archiving orders now. Is there a recommended approach?

[TheTeaTable]

I'm no expert at this, but I would never store payment information. I regularly export all the order info into a fairly advanced relational database that gives me a way to organize everything I need for order history, needed to look up customer history, and track purchasing needs. It really streamlines things and makes purchasing almost automatic.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Back in the day, before I started using MivaPay, I would archive payment information on orders older than 90 days every month so that the payment data was no longer held on my server. Now with MivaPay and credit cards not touching the server any longer, I don't archive orders each month as part of my monthly close.

I'm wondering what the recommended best practice is for archiving orders now. Is there a recommended approach?

I'd recommend when you archive be based on how long the order data, in the Miva Merchant store, may be useful. For example, if you frequently have customers who return and log in to find and re-order from past orders, and a common order interval has quite a bit of time in between, or you have customer service reps where Miva Merchant is the easiest system for them to log in to find order history, you'd probably have good reason to keep that data longer. If that's not typically how your shoppers interact, or you have other systems that make customer data more accessible internally, keeping it in the store doesn't give you much value and removing beyond a certain date on some recurring interval would be the best security practice.

[William Davis]

What about stores with third-party marketing automation integration?

[ILoveHostasaurus]

If such an integration does not keep persistent data, and needs to hit the API or custom module in real time to retrieve data for each campaign, etc., then the order data could need to exist either indefinitely or at least to the point where its value / risk has moved to a point of doing more harm than good. For example, marketing to a particular past customer may do more harm than good past a certain point, like "hey you bought this thing six years ago" may make them upset you kept the data that long if they hadn't shopped since then.

[William Davis]

If such an integration does not keep persistent data, and needs to hit the API or custom module in real time to retrieve data for each campaign, etc., then the order data could need to exist either indefinitely or at least to the point where its value / risk has moved to a point of doing more harm than good. For example, marketing to a particular past customer may do more harm than good past a certain point, like "hey you bought this thing six years ago" may make them upset you kept the data that long if they hadn't shopped since then.

Great point. How to determine that might be a good question for vendor to help determine cut-off point.

[Rick Wilson]

I personally like archiving payment data but leaving orders in perpetuity. Which the admin is configured to handle.

[TheTeaTable]

I personally like archiving payment data but leaving orders in perpetuity. Which the admin is configured to handle.

That's good to know. I have several years of orders in the history, and wondered if there was a point where the system might struggle with it. Of course, I'm a very small business, so a few years of orders isn't that many, compared to some places.

[Rick Wilson]

There's no practical limit to keeping orders, the only reason to archive payment data (even though it's not the whole card number) is that ANY payment data can be sensitive, and you should only keep it as long as you need it for refunds, etc...

[oliverands]

Thanks Rick. That’s good guidance.