Ignored Customers (bulk ignore)
Where to find it: the gear icon at the top right of the Signal Feed, next to the tab bar. Visible to admins and owners only.
Ignored Customers lets you hide specific people from your OuterSignal data — retroactively, immediately, and in bulk.
Main use case: removing employees, staff accounts, test orders, wholesale contacts, or agencies — anyone who shouldn't count toward your metrics at all.
Two ways to ignore someone
By email — ignores one address, or paste a list/upload a CSV to ignore thousands at once (see below).
Main use case: anything from a single named individual — one staff member, one known wholesale contact — up to a whole roster, like offboarding a batch of employees or clearing out a purchased test list.By customer tag — ignores everyone carrying that Shopify customer tag. The tag box will suggest your store's known tags and show how many customers each one covers, or you can type a tag that isn't listed.
Main use case: clearing out a whole category in one move when Shopify already tags them — e.g. everyone tagged staff or wholesale — instead of listing every email by hand.
Important: the tag rule is a standing rule, not a one-time sweep — it's re-applied every time the feed, segments, personas, or an export is built. Any customer carrying that tag is ignored, including ones who show up after you set the rule: if a new customer's first order arrives already carrying the tag, they're hidden automatically, no action needed.
The one gap to know about: if a customer is already in your data and the tag gets added in Shopify afterward, we won't catch it — customer updates from Shopify don't reach us, so the tags we hold for someone are frozen from when we first saw them. So the rule catches new people arriving with the tag; it doesn't catch existing people getting newly tagged. For those existing customers, use the email/CSV method instead.
Bulk ignoring by email
You're not limited to one address at a time:
Type a single address, paste a whole list, or upload a CSV.
Pasted lists can be separated by commas, semicolons, spaces, or line breaks, and the tool handles messy formats like Name <[email protected]>, mailto: prefixes, quotes, and trailing punctuation.
CSVs can have emails in any column — no template required. Max file size is 5 MB.
Before anything is saved, you'll see a review step showing how many addresses will be ignored, how many were already on the list, how many were duplicates within the file, and how many weren't valid (with examples). Up to 50 addresses are listed individually, with a "+ N more" for the rest. Nothing is written until you confirm.
While it runs, you'll see a live progress counter (e.g., "Ignoring 400 of 2,300…"). Large lists are processed in batches of 1,000 behind the scenes.
What ignoring actually does
The person disappears from the Signal Feed immediately, including their existing orders. The feed checks the ignore list on every load, matching by email.
Future orders from an ignored address are dropped on the way in, so the person stays hidden even if they reappear with a new profile.
Nothing is deleted. Ignoring hides data — it doesn't remove it.
Segments recalculate automatically so ignored people no longer count toward segment totals.
Matching is case-insensitive but exact: [email protected] and [email protected] are treated as two different addresses, so use the addresses exactly as they appear on the orders.
Undoing it
Every ignore rule — email or tag — lives in the same panel with an Un-ignore button. Un-ignoring an email means that customer can come back on their next order; un-ignoring a tag brings everyone with that tag back into the feed.
Note: "Ignore Customer" on an individual profile card does the same thing for one person. This is different from Delete Profile — a deleted profile comes back on the customer's next order, but an ignored one does not.
Managing an individual profile: Hide vs. Ignore vs. Delete
The bulk tools above are for lists of people. But for a single customer card, there are three separate actions living in the three-dot menu at the top right of any profile in the Signal Feed — and they're easy to mix up.
Hide Profile
What it does: takes that one profile out of the feed view. A confirmation box appears, then the card disappears.
Who it affects: every user in your organization’s account, not just you — any member can do it, and it's not a personal "hide from my view only."
Reversible? Yes. Hidden profiles can still be pulled up with the Hidden filter, and the same menu then says Unhide Profile.
What it's for: decluttering — a profile you don't want in the way right now but want to keep on hand.
The catch: hiding is attached to that specific profile. If the same person comes back later and lands as a new profile (a fresh sign-up, a different email, etc.), the hide doesn't follow them across. That's what Ignore is for.
Ignore Customer
What it does: removes the customer from the feed and keeps them out, including any future orders they place. This is the single-profile version of the bulk-ignore-by-email tool covered above.
Who can do it: admins and owners only.
Reversible? Yes — the ignored list lives in the same gear panel at the top right of the feed described above; one click to un-ignore.
Why it sticks where hiding doesn't: it's tied to their email address, not to the profile. So if they order again, even under a fresh profile, they stay out.
Data isn't deleted — just kept out of the feed and the analytics built on it.
The confirmation box spells this out: "will be removed from your signal feed and stay excluded — including any future orders they place. Their data is not deleted. You can un-ignore them anytime from Settings."
Delete Profile (for completeness)
Customers often ask about this one in the same breath, so it's worth covering here even though it's a different kind of action:
Admins and owners only, and it requires typing "delete" to confirm.
Permanently removes that profile and everything attached to it — identity data, orders, tags, enrichment, notifications. Cannot be undone.
It does not keep them out. If that customer orders again, they come back as a brand-new profile — the deleted history just doesn't come back with them.
How to frame the choice
"I don't want to look at this right now" → Hide. Reversible, anyone on the team can do it, findable again under the Hidden filter.
"This person shouldn't be in our feed at all — not now, not on their next order" → Ignore. This is the one for staff accounts, wholesale contacts, agencies, or test orders.
"I want this data gone" → Delete. Permanent, and it doesn't stop them reappearing later, so it's rarely the right answer to "stop showing me this person."
Excluded tags (Data Sources)
Where to find it: Data Sources → edit a Shopify channel. Tag filters are grouped into Include (only import orders with these tags) and Exclude (never import orders with these tags), each with both order tags and customer tags. Exclude always wins over include, and matching is case-insensitive.
This is an import filter — it decides whether an order enters OuterSignal at all. Most merchants use it to avoid paying to analyze wholesale, B2B, subscription, or test orders.
The key limitation: it only applies going forward. Orders already imported before you added the excluded tag stay exactly where they are — adding the tag doesn't clean up history. (One exception: if Shopify sends an update to an existing order and its tags now match the exclude list, that order is removed.)
Side-by-side comparison
| Ignored Customers | Excluded tags (Data Sources) |
Scope | People (an email, or everyone with a customer tag) | Orders coming in (order tags or customer tags) |
Existing data | Hidden immediately, retroactively | Left untouched |
Future data | Blocked | Blocked |
Is the data kept? | Yes — hidden, not deleted; un-ignoring is instant | No — never imported, so nothing to restore without changing the filter and re-importing |
Bulk support | Paste or CSV upload for thousands of addresses | One tag at a time |
Who can do it | Admin/owner | Admin/owner |
Which one do I use?
A known list of individuals — staff, test accounts, wholesale contacts, an agency → use Ignored Customers, paste or upload the list.
A whole category of orders you never want in the product, and Shopify already tags them → use excluded tags in Data Sources.
A tag you want gone both historically and going forward → do both: exclude the tag in Data Sources so it stops coming in, and ignore the same tag in the Ignored Customers panel to hide everyone already in the feed. This combination is the piece customers most often miss.