Thread: Can you go from allowing anonymous to not...

if you go to anonymous checkout, can you reverse and go back to required registration without messing up the system/database due to potential duplicates?

While you're waiting for an official response ...

We just did a small project in which we took an anonymous customer and changed them to a registered customer (including adding an encrypted password). It's mostly setting the registered flag (and a few other fields in the customer table).

The only issue I can see is if you've allowed multiple e-mail addresses. That might require cleanup before switching over.

If a customer goes partway through checkout anonymously and then decides to go back and register, that's fine. If they had gone far enough through checkout to enter any personal info (email address, addresses, etc) those fields will be auto-populated on the createaccount page when they go through checkout the other way.

So, I've been allowing annon checkout for 6 months. Will it mess me up if I change it to force customers to register now?

If you've had 'AllowCustomerDuplicateEMailAddresses' set to true up to now, then you can just turn off anonymous checkout and customers will be forced to register and go through the normal checkout process the next time they order.

If you haven't, you've got a few options. You could just set that to true and turn off anonymous checkout and customers who visit the site will have to register to check out. They'll be able to get through everything fine, the only drawback will be they won't see their previous orders. You could also manually convert anonymous customer records in the DB to registered accounts (which as mentioned before just involves setting a few values on their record, but could be time-consuming and requires you to be pretty familiar with SQL). You would then either set a password for each account you changed and let the customer know, or inform customers somehow (newsletter, note on the signin page, etc) that they'll need to request a temporary password to get in the first time they come back to the site.

I had it set to false. My primary problem now is customers who didn't register and then try to register, it says they can't use their email. What is the risk to setting allowcustomerduplicatemailaddress to true?

Would it be better to let them have duplicate emails and not be able to track their orders or should I ratchet it down and not allow anonymous customers?

Allowing anonymous checkout is generally best for conversion rates, but it does entail more work for you. You're going to have to either manually clean up duplicate customer records when a customer does decide to register, or allow duplicate emails which will make order tracking more complicated for you, and prevent customers from seeing their previous orders.

Scott, if I'm not using storefront to track & ship orders, would it be bad to allow duplicate emails?