Customer type appears on two forms: Sales, Discount offers and Sales, Bundles, under When to offer. It is the same field in both places, with the same six choices and the same rules behind it.

It is also the field most likely to behave differently from how it reads. The on-screen help gives you the shape of each type ("5 or more orders and above the VIP spend threshold"), and this article gives you the actual numbers, the order they are checked in, and the one condition that has to be true before any of them can match at all.

Customer type only matches once Arbyn knows who the shopper is.

Arbyn identifies a shopper by their email address. That happens when they give it in chat, when they reply to one of your emails, or when they fill in a quiz lead form. Until then, the shopper has no customer record, and an offer restricted to any customer type simply will not be offered to them.

This matters more than it sounds. A large share of storefront chat happens before anyone types an email. If you set a discount to New customers only and wonder why it almost never goes out, this is usually why: it is not that your shoppers are the wrong type, it is that Arbyn does not yet know their type, and a restricted offer is held back rather than guessed at.

So the rule is: an unknown shopper matches nothing except Anyone. Arbyn never assumes. If you want an offer that can reach a browsing stranger, leave Customer type on Anyone.

There is a short delay too. When a shopper gives their email mid-conversation, Arbyn starts building their record immediately but does not hold up the reply while it does. On that one message, the shopper can still read as unknown. From the next message on, their type is available.

Arbyn works down this list in order and stops at the first one that fits. The order is the important part, and it is covered in the next section.

Two of these are worth reading twice.

Churned and At-risk are about time, not about money. Neither one asks how many orders the shopper placed or how much they spent. They ask a single question: how long has it been since their last order. That is why they are the right home for win-back offers, and why a first-time buyer who never came back lands in Churned alongside someone who once spent thousands.

VIP is the only type with two thresholds, and both must be true. Four orders totalling 900 dollars is not VIP. Six orders totalling 300 dollars is not VIP either. It takes 5 orders and 500 dollars together.

This is the one that surprises people, and it is worth understanding before you build a VIP offer.

Recency is checked before order count and spend. Arbyn asks "when did they last order?" first, and only if the answer is "recently" does it go on to ask "how many, and how much?"

So a customer with 8 orders and 900 dollars spent, whose last order was 100 days ago, is At-risk. Not VIP. The VIP thresholds are never even reached, because the recency question already answered first and the list stops at the first fit.

Read that way it is deliberate rather than broken. A customer who has drifted away for three months is, right now, a win-back problem, and treating them as a VIP would send them a loyalty message when they need a reason to come back. But if you were expecting "5 orders and 500 dollars" to be sufficient on its own, it is not, and a VIP-only offer will reach fewer people than you predicted.

The practical consequence: VIP effectively means a high-value customer who has ordered within the last 90 days. If you want to reach high-value customers regardless of how long it has been, you need two offers, one for VIP and one for At-risk, rather than one.

Everything under When to offer combines as AND, never OR.

If you set Customer type: VIP customers only and Cart minimum: 100 dollars, the offer goes out only when both are true. There is no way to express "VIP shoppers, or anyone with a 100 dollar cart" in a single offer. That takes two offers.

Every condition also fails closed. If Arbyn cannot establish the answer, the condition does not match. An unknown shopper fails a Customer type condition, and a shopper with no cart yet fails a Cart minimum condition. Nothing is ever waved through on a guess, which is the behaviour you want when the thing being waved through is a discount.

Arbyn keeps a customer record per shopper and stores their type on it, rather than recalculating it in the middle of a conversation. The record is refreshed:

The order counts and spend totals come from your Shopify customer records, so they reflect real orders in your store, not chat activity.

One consequence worth knowing: because the type is stored rather than computed on the spot, a customer who orders in the middle of a conversation does not instantly change type within that same conversation. They will be current the next time Arbyn refreshes them, which is usually within minutes.

A few pairings that follow from the rules above:

Why is my New customers only offer almost never going out? Most likely the shoppers seeing it have not given an email yet, so Arbyn does not know their type and holds the offer back. Check whether the conversations reaching that offer are ones where an email was captured.

A customer with lots of orders is not matching my VIP offer. Why? Check when they last ordered. If it was more than 90 days ago they are At-risk, and if more than 180 days they are Churned. Recency is evaluated before order count and spend.

Can I target "VIP or At-risk" in one offer? No. Conditions combine as AND, and Customer type takes a single value. Build two offers, and use Priority to decide which one wins if they could ever both apply.

Does a shopper's type change while they are chatting? Not usually within the same message. Arbyn refreshes the record shortly after an email is captured and on a regular background pass, so the type is current from the next message onward.

Where do the order counts come from? Your Shopify customer records. Arbyn reads them, it does not maintain its own separate order history.