Anonymous Users that Place Orders Deleted?

[sweeperq]

We have anonymous checkout enabled in our AC7 stores. Someone was looking for a customer when they called in today and couldn't find them. So I searched all the orders and was able to locate their order. When I clicked on the Customer Profile it threw a server error. Is the Anonymous User cleanup procedure supposed to delete anonymous users that have an associated order?

[david-ebt]

The clean up procedure does delete ALL anonymous users, even those that have an order. Whether it should do that is another question.

[jmestep]

It does do that and I think it is partly because they are anonymous, which means they might come back again and try to check out anonymous again and if there was still a user, they would get the message that there was already someone registered with that email address. On one client who has anonymous checkout enabled, I "fix" one or two orders a week where the customer used anonymous checkout and the admins can't do things like change the shipping method to reship an order later or the customer wants to see his previous orders or he wants do download his digital good, which he can't come back and do. (If he wants do do that, he shouldn't have checked out as anonymous!!!). I told the client that spending 10-15 minutes fixing the order by hooking to a user or creating a user and then hooking the order up, they were spending much more than the profit they were making on the order! So I am going to code it so that if the customer wants to checkout as anonymous, they get a random password created behind the scenes and the account is created as non-anonymous. Then the only problem would be that if the customer comes back to place an order, they would get the message that there already was an account, but at least they could get a lost password email and log in to complete the order. Ability to check out as anonymous user is a little faster for the customer and they probably think it is more secure or something because they think their information isn't being stored, but it is anyway.