A customer’s third order arrives. Your packer opens the card and sees “Loyal · Established · High-value” next to the name. They’re a returning customer, more than a year with you, spending above your average. The packer knows how to treat the order without asking you, without flipping through history, and without anyone having to tag them manually.
That’s customer tags: HQ works out who a customer is from how they actually shop, and surfaces the labels wherever customer context appears.
Six channels, each independent
Each channel looks at a different angle. Any channel can be on or off on its own.
- Commitment. First order, second, returning, loyal. How deep into the relationship are they?
- Tenure. Newcomer, established, long-standing, veteran. How long have they been with you?
- Value. Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum (labels and thresholds configurable). What tier of spend?
- Price sensitivity. Full-price, mixed, discount-hunter. Do they wait for sales, or do they pay list?
- Engagement. Cold, warm, hot, active. How recently have they come back?
- Returns. Measured as return rate against lifetime value: low, moderate, elevated. Separate from Value, so you can see “big spender, but also big returner” independently.
Thresholds for each band live in the Tag settings. Sensible defaults ship; most shops leave them alone; shops with unusual patterns tune them.
Where tags show up
- Customer profile: above the fold, every customer’s page.
- Order edit screen Intel Panel: beside the order, so staff processing it see the tags without opening the profile.
- Packsie packing card: trimmed to the essentials so warehouse staff get context while packing.
- Customers list: filterable and sortable by any tag value.
When tags change because behaviour changed (a newcomer becomes established; a cold customer comes back hot), the tag updates. No manual retagging.
Tags are automatic. Flags are manual. They’re different jobs.
They pair, they don’t replace each other:
- Tags describe how a customer shops. Behavioural and automatic. “Core customer. High value. Discount hunter.”
- Flags describe how you want your team to treat a customer. Editorial and manual. “VIP. Caution. Do Not Serve.”
Both show on the profile side by side; they just answer different questions. Tags = “who they are”. Flags = “what we want done about it”. Don’t conflate them and the system stays clear.
Built for automation
Tags are first-class conditions in Priority Rules: write a rule that says “if a customer has the Loyal tag, bump priority to Elevated” and the matcher picks it up automatically. Customer tag, customer LTV, customer order count, and customer status are all available as rule sources alongside shipping, order, and product conditions.
Store Alerts don’t read tags directly; they run on the five fixed status / value / new-customer triggers. If you need tag-driven emails, Priority Rules can set a priority level your packing team triages visually, or a marketing-automation plugin like AutomateWoo can take the tag conditions further.
If you’re weighing this up against AutomateWoo, FluentCRM, or Jetpack CRM
AutomateWoo offers rule-based tagging as part of its marketing automation suite. Tags are applied in response to trigger events and can drive email sequences. HQ’s tags are calculated continuously from WooCommerce data (not triggered by events), so they reflect current behaviour at all times rather than “they were tagged at some point, possibly out of date now.” Different jobs; the two can run alongside each other without overlap.
FluentCRM and Jetpack CRM offer manual and automation-driven tagging inside a broader CRM. Tags there are mostly what you mark customers with, supplemented by automation rules. HQ’s tags are derived from order history automatically, with no manual tagging required. If you want the full CRM toolkit plus tags, use the CRM. If you want shop-behaviour tags without the CRM overhead, HQ is built for that.
Why shops leave it on
Once tags are on, you stop having to explain customer context to new staff. The labels do the explaining. Packers, customer-service, returns reviewers all open a customer and see the same story at a glance. Nothing falls to memory; nothing depends on one person knowing who’s who.