What orders qualify?
OuterSignal processes orders that meet all of the following criteria:
1. US and Australia shipping/billing addresses only OuterSignal currently enriches customers located in the United States and Australia. Orders from other countries — including the UK, Canada, EU, and New Zealand — are not processed and won't appear in your Signal Feed.
If your brand does significant international volume, your qualifying customer count will be lower than your total Shopify count.
2. Completed, paid orders only The following order types are automatically excluded:
$0 orders — free gifts, 100%-off discount codes, and comp orders
Cancelled orders — any order with a cancelled status
Pre-orders — orders are not processed until they are fulfilled and shipped. If you ran a pre-order campaign, those customers will appear once their orders ship.
3. All sales channels OuterSignal ingests orders across all sales channels on your connected Shopify store, including POS. The following order types are still excluded:
Draft orders and admin-created orders
Wholesale or B2B channels
Other Shopify sales channel apps
Note: POS customers may appear in your Signal Feed with limited or no enrichment. In-store customers often don’t provide a full name, email address, or billing address at checkout — and OuterSignal needs that information to enrich a customer profile.
4. Shopify tag exclusions If your store uses Shopify order or customer tags to identify segments like wholesale accounts, internal test orders, or gift card purchases, those tagged orders may be excluded from OuterSignal depending on your configuration. If you've set up tag-based exclusion rules, those will reduce your qualifying count. You can configure these rules in Data Sources — open your store’s channel settings and look for the “Exclude — skip orders/customers that have these tags” option.
Why am I only seeing recent customers?
When you upgrade to Pro, OuterSignal automatically pulls in your last 7 days of orders — no action needed on your part. On the free plan, OuterSignal pulls up to 1,000 of your most recent customers at install.
In both cases, everything before that window — your weeks, months, or years of order history — doesn't come in automatically. Historical customers won't appear in your Signal Feed until you run a backsearch to bring them in.
This is intentional. Historical data pulls (backsearch) are charged at $0.03 per unique customer — and we want you to be in control of how far back you go before anything runs.
To bring in your historical customers, you need to initiate a backsearch manually. The further back you pull, the more customers appear in your Signal Feed, the richer your Personas become, and the more powerful your segmentation gets.
We recommend pulling at least 6–12 months of history to give OuterSignal enough data to generate meaningful Personas and surface your best customers.
What happens if I have fewer than 1,000 qualifying customers?
Signal Feed: Your Signal Feed works with any number of qualifying customers, but if you're under 1,000 you may find yourself in a demo state. This isn't something you can resolve yourself — just reach out to support@outersignal.com and we'll give you a manual push to get you moving.
Brand Personas: Personas require at least 1,000 qualifying customers to generate. If you haven't hit that threshold yet your Personas tab will remain empty until you do — this is expected and will resolve automatically as more qualifying orders come in.
The fastest way to reach both thresholds is running a backsearch to pull in more order history. See Can you pull historical customer data?
Why is my count so much lower than I expected?
Here are the most common reasons, in order of how frequently we see them:
Only seeing recent customers — on the free plan OuterSignal pulls up to 1,000 recent customers at install; on Pro the last 7 days are pulled automatically. Everything before that requires a backsearch
International-heavy store — a large portion of your orders ship outside the US/AU
Recent launch — your store is newer and hasn't yet reached 1,000 qualifying customers
Pre-order campaign — you ran a large pre-order that hasn't shipped yet
Heavy comp or free-sample programs — $0 orders are a significant portion of your volume
Retail/wholesale volume — most of your orders come through POS or non-Online Store channels
If none of the above explain the gap, reach out to support@outersignal.com and we'll take a look.