Impersonate

The Impersonate menu is the API equivalent of the admin datagrid's "Login as Customer" action — it lets an admin act as a customer to reproduce an issue, check what the customer sees, or place an order in their shoes.

How "Login as Customer" works headlessly

In the admin panel, "Login as Customer" logs the admin into the storefront as that customer through a browser session. That session-based flow doesn't translate to a stateless API, so the API does the headless equivalent: it issues a short-lived customer token. The admin uses that token as the customer's Bearer token to call the storefront API (/api/shop/*) as the customer.

So "login as customer" becomes "get a customer token".

Token semantics

• The issued token is short-lived — it expires one hour after issue.
• It is tagged with the issuing admin's id for audit, so impersonation is traceable.
• The response returns the token plus the customer's id, email, and name, the issuing admin id, and the expiry time.

Field meanings

Field	Meaning
token	The customer Bearer token to use against the storefront API.
customerId / customerEmail / customerName	Who the token acts as.
impersonatedByAdminId	The admin who issued it (audit).
expiresAt	When the token stops working (one hour from issue).

Operations in this menu

Action	Operation
Issue Impersonation Token	createAdminCustomerImpersonate mutation

Permission: customers.customers.edit.

All operations require an admin Bearer token — see Authentication.