How to avoid email attribute populating after web purchase?

Are you using your own Paddle checkout or one of RevenueCat’s web checkout options?

You can clear the email from the customer profile, or set the $email attribute to an empty string. The catch is that this only clears it after it’s already been saved, so it doesn’t really solve the privacy concern you’re describing.

I’m not sure whether it’ll come back on a later sync, so I wouldn’t rely on clearing it as a permanent fix. That’s the part I’d check with RevenueCat support.

Here’s how to clear the attribute: https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/customers/customer-attributes

I’m using a web purchase link. I guess populating the email attribute is done by the RC webhook when it is notified by Paddle of the purchase.

Hi there!

With your setup, Paddle acts as the merchant of record, and they require a customer email on every checkout as they issue the receipt and invoice. When the purchase completes, RevenueCat then writes that email into the customer's $email attribute if the attribute is empty. There is no project setting to turn this off.

As ​@Crudyg123  mentioned, you can clear it after, either from the Customer Profile screen, or by deleting the attribute via SDK or REST API (guide here).

A couple of points that I can add:

• Subscription renewals will not restore the cleared value, as renewal events carry no buyer email.
• A new purchase by the same customer will restore it. In this case you might want to clear it again after each new purchase (e.g: automate it with a backend handler on the INITIAL_PURCHASE webhook that calls the attributes endpoint).

I hope this helps!

Best regards,