Billing Email vs Profile Email General Question

Hi @czemel

What is the difference and purpose between the Profile email address (also used to login) and the billing email address? How does Woocommerce use each one?

Most of the times these two fields (Profile and Billing) would have the same address on your site.

However, and depending on how the user decides to checkout this will be classified as a Customer or Guest.

By default, a user on your store can checkout as either a customer or a guest.

Customers are those that have an account on your store that they can login to. That means that either during checkout or from the My Account page, they opted to create an account and now have their details saved on your store for future purchases.

Guests on the other hand are those users that have made a purchase from your store but didn’t create an account. Of course, orders made by guests show up alongside orders made by customers in the Orders list and in the Orders (and similar) reports.

More information about both options can be configured within your WooCommerce settings in the “Accounts and Privacy” tab: https://woocommerce.com/document/configuring-woocommerce-settings/#accounts-and-privacy-settings

Hope that helps!

`Most of the times these two fields (Profile and Billing) would have the same address on your site.

However, and depending on how the user decides to checkout this will be classified as a Customer or Guest.

By default, a user on your store can checkout as either a customer or a guest.

Customers are those that have an account on your store that they can login to. That means that either during checkout or from the My Account page, they opted to create an account and now have their details saved on your store for future purchases.

Guests on the other hand are those users that have made a purchase from your store but didn’t create an account. Of course, orders made by guests show up alongside orders made by customers in the Orders list and in the Orders (and similar) reports.

More information about both options can be configured within your WooCommerce settings in the “Accounts and Privacy” tab: https://woocommerce.com/document/configuring-woocommerce-settings/#accounts-and-privacy-settings

Hope that helps!

Thanks for your detailed response! But still confused about one thing.
In the store setup, Guest checkout is not allowed. So it seems like according to your comments that the billing and profile email address should be one and the same.
However, when I change the billing email address on the checkout screen, it doesn’t change the profile/login email address. To change that I need to go to the user account profile area to change that.

Hi @czemel

when I change the billing email address on the checkout screen, it doesn’t change the profile/login email address. To change that I need to go to the user account profile area to change that.

This is expected. If you prefer to have the billing email default to the customer’s WordPress account email address, you’ll need do some customization like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68763291/set-wordpress-user-email-instead-of-billing-email-as-default-value-for-woocommer

If you are not comfortable with coding, I’d recommend getting in touch with a web developer or one of the services on our Customizations page: https://woocommerce.com/customizations/

We’ve not heard back from you in a while, so I’m marking this thread as resolved. If you have further questions, please feel free to open a new topic.