Telephone number on customer address shouldn't be required

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Feature request from hostep, posted on GitHub Aug 17, 2015

Hi guys

Why is the telephone number still required on a customer address? We hear from our shop owners that a lot of customers refuse to enter something in there or just enter gibberish.

An ideal solution would be if you could add a configuration option in the backend similar to the Gender, Tax/Vat Number and Date of Birth fields. So an option for showing the telephone number where you can choose between No, Optional or Required. What do you think?

I had to implement this today into a Magento CE 1.x store and it was kind of a terrible experience, changing stuff in the database, remove the hard coded validation of that field (which is still present btw: https://github.com/magento/magento2/blob/93312cae42824274722fe7a285d5ce8e40f177a1/app/code/Magento/C...), ...

Related to https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/624

[apiuser]

Comment from danielneu, posted on GitHub Jun 02, 2016

I agree on this. Phone numbers are not always necessary in specific situations and / or countries. It is like state information and postal codes, some kind of configuration to make this mandatory would be really helpful.

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Comment from nntoan, posted on GitHub Jun 17, 2016

I don't think so, phone number is required by default because it is the basic e-commerce or commerce workflow. How do the seller contact to buyer without any phone number? This is also an avoid-abuse system, of course if the man who placed an order without any phone number, it is obviously abuse order and should be ignored.

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Comment from tigerx7, posted on GitHub Jun 17, 2016

I would have to disagree that someone placing an order without a phone number is obviously a fraudulent order and that there's no other way to contact a customer but by phone. A clear example would be in the industry that we're in which is adult products and where discretion is valued very highly. Not everyone wants to provide a phone number because they don't want to run the risk of getting called on their personal line about an intimate product.

Second, the most obvious way to contact a customer if they don't provide a phone number is via email; which almost all of our customers prefer. A good portion of phone numbers we are provided are obvious fake phone numbers; but we hardly receive fake email addresses. I can only imagine how many abandoned carts we're receiving due to the required phone number field and the sensitivity to providing that information in our industry.

[apiuser]

Comment from danielneu, posted on GitHub Jun 17, 2016

@nntoan this is not how it works everywhere and in all industries. No one says remove that field, we are just asking to get an option to make it optional. This way anyone can decide whether orders without phone numbers can be accepted or not.

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Comment from andidhouse, posted on GitHub Jun 28, 2016

Yes exactly. The telephone number should be optional. Here in Germany there is no need for this at all. Can someone point out how we make this field not a required field or how we can even delete it?

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Comment from ludwig-gramberg, posted on GitHub Jun 29, 2016

you can manipulate the data so its no longer required, the validation info is stored in customer_eav_attribute in the column validate_rules and the fact that the field is required is store in eav_attribute column is_required, you'll find the attribute by searching for the attribute_code telephone

here's the query update eav_attribute set is_required=0 where attribute_code='telephone';

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Comment from owebia, posted on GitHub Jun 29, 2016

It is not so simple, in some files, the telephone validation is harcoded like here :
vendor/magento/module-customer/Model/Address/AbstractAddress.php, in function validate()

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Comment from andidhouse, posted on GitHub Jul 09, 2016

@ilol the first is really important to have an option here in the backend to 1. show the telephone number yes/no and 2. to have it as a required field yes/no - so anyone can decide.

I think it is a must must have (look at hundreds of posts in forums regarding this on magento1 and 2 now. :-/. The hole checkout is in my view very very hard to customize and takes ages to load especially on mobile devices. Also usability is not really well designed - but this is another topic.

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Comment from ludwig-gramberg, posted on GitHub Jul 15, 2016

we ended up overwriting a few classes via di.xml to change the behaviour, it's kind of all over the place though, there are 4-5 places you have to change

[apiuser]

Comment from joellarsson130, posted on GitHub Jul 15, 2016

Could you explain more detail?