A customer messages you from their personal email. You remember last year’s emails were from their work address. Without aliases, your system sees two separate customers; the preferences you noted on one don’t show up on the other. Record the second email as an alias on the same profile, and the context follows them regardless of which inbox they’re writing from today.
That’s the whole feature: a small, private, staff-only record that says “these contact details also belong to this profile.” Tracksies stitches contacts back to the right customer in the background.
Four alias types
- Email: an alternate address they also use.
- Phone: an alternate number.
- Address: an alternate shipping address.
- Name: an alternate spelling (Rob / Robert), a maiden name, a nickname.
Each alias lives on one customer’s profile. No merging, no data shared between profiles, no second login.
Where it pays off
Consistent preferences. A customer’s preferences and notes are on their profile: card packaging not bubble wrap, fragrance allergies, gift-wrap the December order. Aliasing their second email means staff opening a message from that address see the same notes without having to think about it.
A quiet safety net for Do Not Serve customers. Somebody flagged DNS tries a new email to slip an order through. If you’ve aliased that email to their DNS profile (because you spotted the same phone number or address pattern), the flag surfaces the moment the order lands. The alias is what makes that catch automatic instead of leaning on staff memory.
Search that finds everything. Looking for a customer who spells their name both ways, or who had a maiden name showing in old orders? Aliasing both versions means one search finds every order, every interaction, every note.
Adding, removing, auditing
Open any customer profile, click Add Alias, pick the type, type the value. Duplicates are caught automatically (same type plus value already on this customer). Email aliases are validated as real addresses before saving.
With the audit log on, every add and remove writes to it (operator, timestamp, the lot). If an alias was added by mistake, just remove it; with logging on, both actions stay on file. Audit logging is opt-in; the Audit log feature has the details on enabling it.
Private by design
Aliases stay inside your admin. The customer whose profile carries an alias doesn’t see it; the alias doesn’t grant a second login; customers can’t add their own. Staff with profile-edit permissions add and remove them, the audit log captures the change, and each alias attaches to one existing profile without ever touching another customer’s data.
If a misplaced alias ever shows an incoming email under the wrong profile, you remove it; nothing else moves.
Feature toggle
Aliases are off by default. Turn them on if your shop has the one-customer-many-identifiers pattern: B2B, wholesale, long-term repeat customers, or contexts where DNS catches need that extra net.
Helps staff recognise; doesn’t replace verification
Aliases help your team recognise a customer. They don’t replace identity-verification protocol when it counts (refund decisions, customer-data releases, account changes). Staff still verify they’re talking to who they think they’re talking to. What aliases add on top: once verification’s done, the customer’s full history is sitting right there.
Not the same as linked accounts
Aliases: one customer profile, multiple identifiers for that one person.
Linked accounts: two separate customer profiles, flagged as related (household, business pair, customer who registered under a new email).
The Linked accounts feature covers the two-profiles case.