> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://developer.paddle.com/llms.txt).

# Customers

Customer entities hold information about the people and businesses that make purchases. They're related to addresses and businesses.

---

Customers are the people and businesses that buy the products listed in your catalog.

Paddle automatically creates customers for you as part of [the checkout](https://developer.paddle.com/concepts/sell/self-serve-checkout.md), or you can create and manage them using the Paddle dashboard or API.

Customer entities hold information like:

- Who's being billed.
- What their email address is.
- Whether they've opted-in to marketing.

Customers have two subentities:

- [**Addresses**](https://developer.paddle.com/api-reference/addresses.md), which hold information about customer billing addresses
- [**Businesses**](https://developer.paddle.com/api-reference/businesses.md), which hold information that you need when working with a business

Customers, addresses, and businesses work with [checkouts](https://developer.paddle.com/concepts/sell/self-serve-checkout.md), [transactions](https://developer.paddle.com/api-reference/transactions.md), and [subscriptions](https://developer.paddle.com/api-reference/subscriptions.md) to let customers purchase [products](https://developer.paddle.com/api-reference/products.md) and [prices](https://developer.paddle.com/api-reference/prices.md).

{% callout type="info" %}
There's no delete operation for customers. Use the [update a customer operation](https://developer.paddle.com/api-reference/customers/update-customer.md) to archive customers when you no longer need them. To learn more, see [Delete entities](https://developer.paddle.com/api-reference/about/delete-entities.md)
{% /callout %}