Why do companies let users deactivate or delete their account?
I see this mostly for social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook. Should other sites such as ecommerce let users deactivate their account?
Answer
If you feel that people should have some control over their own information, then you should make it possible for them to delete that information from your system.
Since ecommerce sites (at least as I know in the US) have to deal with tax reporting, and in most systems if you delete an account then all reporting dealing with that account is deleted as well, allowing users to delete an account is likely not a legal option. At least not until the 7 year period for having audits come up has passed.
Based on info in the comments, if you have customers in Europe they have a legal right to have their information removed. One solution to this if you need to keep the account in your billing system for reporting would be to replace all of their information with dummy data. That way their information is no longer stored so you meet your legal requirements, but you don't lose your historical billing data.
Also consider the case of the recent Ashley Madison hack. It was revealed that a number of users were willing to pay money to have their information deleted from the site. That tells you that, at least in some contexts if not all, being able to delete an account is a very important feature. Shame paying money didn't actually delete anything.
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