Purchase history

Detects customer purchase histories: a purchase / transaction / order history phrase combined with populated order data - rows keyed by a customer or order identifier, labelled order numbers, dates or totals, or labelled customer/member identifiers. Phrase-only mentions stay discovery-only.

Type: regex
Engine: boost_regex
Confidence: medium
Confidence justification: Enforce tiers require populated dataset structure (a data row keyed by a customer/record identifier, a labelled value or a labelled identifier) beside the topic phrase; a column header on its own only counts toward 85, so blank extracts stay at 65. Help pages, policies, product copy and news that only name the topic stay at 65. Medium because internal analytics documentation with worked examples can still reach 75.
Detection quality: Topic false positive
Jurisdictions: global
Regulations: Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), Information Privacy Act 2009 (Qld), NDB Scheme (Cth), GDPR
Frameworks: ISO 27001, ISO 27701
Data categories: pii
Scope: wide
Risk rating: 8
Platform compatibility: Purview: Compatible, GCP DLP: Compatible, Macie: Compatible, Zscaler: Compatible, Palo Alto: Degraded, Netskope: Unsupported

Pattern

(?i)\b(?:purchase\s+histor(?:y|ies)|transaction\s+histor(?:y|ies)|order\s+histor(?:y|ies)|buying\s+patterns?|past\s+purchases|purchasing\s+behaviou?r|sales\s+records?)\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

average order value, basket size, repeat purchase, RFM, recency, purchase frequency, returns, product category, units sold, next best offer

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

Purchase history export - customer 88104421 customer_id,order_id,order_date,sku,product_name,qty,order_total 88104421,SO-771904,2026-08-12,SKU-44120,Bamboo cot sheets,2,89.90 88104421,SO-771955,2026-09-02,SKU-10087,Prenatal vitamins 90 tabs,1,34.95 RFM segment: recency 22 days, purchase frequency 14 per year. — Order extract - header, customer rows and RFM evidence (85)
Order history for customer Customer number: 88104421 Requested by the customer under an access request. — Single labelled customer identifier (75)
Loyalty CRM - purchase history summary Member ID: LM-5520781 Order number: WEB-9934120 Order date: 14/09/2026 Order total: $212.40 Average order value $96.15 over 18 orders; repeat purchase every 21 days; top product category: premium pet food. Next best offer: 15% off the next bulk order. — Loyalty CRM profile with labelled member ID, order number/date/total and retail analytics evidence (85)

Should not match

Help centre article: you can view your order history and purchase history in your account. Select an order to see the order number, items and total. — Help article naming the fields
Purchase history report customer_id,order_id,order_date,sku,qty,order_total — Blank extract - column header only (65)
Retailers are mining purchase history to predict demand, with average order value up 6% this year, according to a news report. — News item
unrelated generic text without domain phrases — Unrelated
customer invoice — Generic word pair

Known false positives

Privacy notices, help-centre articles, product pages and policies describing purchase and order history. Mitigation: They name the topic without populated rows, labelled values or identifiers, and guidance/help framing is excluded, so they stay at 65.
Analytics training material and documentation with worked examples of purchase and order history. Mitigation: Training and template framing is excluded; unframed worked examples with realistic rows can still reach 75.
News and industry commentary with aggregate statistics. Mitigation: Aggregate percentages are not keyed to a record identifier, so they do not satisfy the row or labelled-value structures.