The majority of shops allow guest checkout, because it’s preferred by many customers, since it’s a (slightly) quicker way to shop and no account created should mean no mass communications from the shops.
Or because they just forgot their password. ?
And probably many other reasons.

The fact is, guest checkout is here to stay.

We have used a concept to consolidate customer accounts with guest “accounts” if they have used the same email address to purchase products or services within your store. In order for it to be better clarified we have written this article to explain with examples.

If you are already using Reveal and have completed the Onboarding process, you have seen it as a question with two options in the first step, “How do you consider a customer who ordered both as a guest and with a registered account having the same email?” and you could choose one of the two:

If you have a Shopify store, you must have used our Reveal application for Shopify. The consolidate accounts with guests option has been presented during the account configuration phase:

We also have the Merge Customers with Guests option in Settings > General section > Reports > Edit:

Note! No retroactive application of this option

Please keep in mind that once imported, the data will not be changed by changing the value for this option.

For example, if you have imported your data in the onboarding process, but decide later that you want to merge customers with guests, you will have to reimport all customers and all orders.

A simple example for this concept would be the following:

Jane Doe is a customer of your store, she logs into her account and orders monthly from you. Last month, she forgot to log into her account, and ordered as a guest.

If you choose to enable “Merge Customers with Guests” then all of her orders will be under one customer.

If you choose to leave it disabled, all of the orders when Jane has ordered as a logged in user, will be added to a customer account, but her last order, when she ordered as a guest, will be assigned to a separate guest customer.

Orders placed by the same email address as guest are always consolidated into the same customer account.

For example, if Jane Doe uses the same email account jane.doe@example.com to place 3 orders using guest checkout, all her orders will be attributed to a single customer account, created by Reveal.
​This happens regardless of Jane Doe having a customer account or not, and no matter the value of “Merge Customers with Guests”.

Revisiting the simple example for consolidating the orders into the same account, we’ll explain a scenario that’s a bit more complex. This should give you the complete understanding on how this actually works.

Jane Doe is a customer of your store, she logs into her account and orders monthly from you – let’s say she placed 13 orders until 3 months ago. But, after this, she forgot to log into her account, and ordered as a guest, 2 times. Since then, she placed 3 more orders as a logged in customer, and this month, it happened again: Jane ordered as a guest, 3 times in a row.

If you choose to enable “Merge Customers with Guests” then all of her orders will be under one customer.

If you choose to leave it disabled, all of the orders when Jane has ordered as a logged in user will be added to a customer account, which will result in her having 16 orders in her registered customer account. But the orders she placed as a guest will be assigned to a separate guest customer, having 5 orders.

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