Hi,
I would like to store as little identifying information about my users as possible for privacy purposes.
When making a web purchase through Paddle, the payment screen asks the user for their email in order to send their receipt after the purchase. This email later shows up in the “E-mail” attribute for the customer on the RC dashboard.
I do not need this attribute populated, is there any way to avoid it?
Best answer by hafizrahman
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
A couple of points that I can add:
INITIAL_PURCHASE webhook that calls the attributes endpoint).I hope this helps!
Best regards,
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.
+1Hi 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
A couple of points that I can add:
INITIAL_PURCHASE webhook that calls the attributes endpoint).I hope this helps!
Best regards,
Hi, thanks for the reply!
Is there a way for my backend to get notified of a purchase so I can trigger the attribute deletion automatically?
Yes, you can use a RevenueCat webhook for that. In your project, go to Integrations → Webhooks → Add new configuration and enter your backend’s HTTPS endpoint.
Handle INITIAL_PURCHASE for new subscriptions, or NON_RENEWING_PURCHASE for one time purchases. Use the event’s app_user_id to call POST /subscribers/{app_user_id}/attributes and set the $email attribute’s value to an empty string.
Set and validate the webhook authorization header, and make the handler safe to retry. This still clears the email after it has been collected, so it doesn’t prevent the initial storage.
Webhook setup: https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/integrations/webhooks
Clearing attributes: https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/customers/customer-attributes#deleting-attributes
+6Hey folks,
Thanks for following up!
To add more context, the email is saved on the customer profile before the INITIAL_PURCHASE or NON_RENEWING_PURCHASE event is sent, so clearing it from your webhook handler won't be undone by that same purchase.
Since your goal is to store as little as possible, it's good to know that our webhook payloads also include the customer's attributes in the subscriber_attributes field. That means the first purchase event will still contain the email. You can drop that field on your side and avoid logging the raw payload. Any other integrations you have enabled can receive it with that event too: www.revenuecat.com/docs/integrations/web…/event-types-and-fields
Note that when you call the attributes endpoint (docs here), you can leave updated_at_ms out of the request. If it's set to an older time than the saved email (like the purchase time from the event) the change would be ignored.
We hope this helps, but let us know if you have any further questions!
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