We recently started utilizing the TNEW Guest Checkout feature on our site. As warned in the documentation, whenever a patron drops out of the check out process without ultimately purchasing a ticket a dummy TNEW Guest Checkout account is created. The documentation suggests merging all of these dups together, which we can certainly do, but I was wondering if anyone else has a different process that they have implemented and find to be more effective than scheduling the merge,
IIRC there is a setting available for you to decide whether these guest accounts should be created as members of a single household, or as individual records.
Merging these records is pointless in my opinion -- the merge process only moves data from one constituent to another -- it doesn't actually delete anything, just inactivates the "delete" constituent. What I do is have a step in my nightly database maintenance script that just inactivates all the guest checkout records outright. Here's the script:
DECLARE @inactive_reason int;
SELECT @inactive_reason = id
FROM TR_INACTIVE_REASON
WHERE [description] = 'Abandoned Guest Checkout'
UPDATE T_CUSTOMER
SET inactive = 2,
inactive_reason = @inactive_reason
WHERE lname = 'TNEW Guest Checkout'
AND inactive = 1
AND last_activity_dt < DATEADD(hh, -1, GETDATE())
Is this still considered best practice? Looking to clean up our database.