We are using the Guest Checkout function in TNEW and noticed that when someone chooses to checkout as a guest but then abandons their cart, a blank record is left in Tessitura with the name "TNEW Guest Checkout".
I know these abandoned records don't technically cause an issue except for the database management aspect. After just a few months, we have almost 900 of these records.
Has anyone else found a workaround for this?
One solution is de-activated these records periodically. I have consulted with TNEW team and they explained to me that ‘TNEW Guest Checkout’ records are created when a checkout process were not completed during the Guest Checkout in TNEW Version 5.
Sabina
From: Tessitura Web Forum [mailto:forums-tessitura-web@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Tammi Aldrink Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2015 1:13 PM To: Sabina Spilkin Subject: [Tessitura Web Forum] Abandoned Carts & Guest Checkout Leaving Blank Patron Records
You were sent this email automatically because you subscribed to the Tessitura Web forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Web forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!
I was just going to ask about this too. I realize this is expected behavior, but I think I'm going to submit an enhancement request to have TNEW automatically inactivate these records once the user's session expires. At present, it looks like the only way to distinguish the abandoned guest checkout records from the completed ones is to string match on TNEW Guest Checkout in the name field.
When you do your periodic inactivation of these, do you have a SQL script that you've already made up? Or is it a manual process?
I think I'd be tempted to Merge them all into one big dummy constituent record, rather than inactivating them.
That way they disappear from view altogether. And it's not hard to automate creating the merge-scheduling records in t_Potential_dups. Since they presumably don't have any other data associated with the record, the collecting constituent shouldn't become a performance problem.
Ken
Yeah, I was thinking about that too -- I believe each record does have its abandoned cart associated with it somewhere in the db. And of course a merge IS a type of inactivation as far as the DB is concerned, so I think the only difference that would make is the number of records returned in the event that someone decides to search for "TNEW Guest Checkout". And it could even be useful to see just how many records there are...
I just don't want them showing up in my extractions! :-) And I hate using suppression criteria based on string matching...
So, I recently had some "free" time and modified Tessitura's Stored Procedure to Merge Constituents. If you create a new list that has all the blank "Guest Checkout" Accounts, then execute this procedure, it'll pull all constituents from the list and merge them.
I have uploaded the stored procedure (LP_MERGE_CUSTOMER2_FROM_LIST.sql) to my profile and this reply if anyone is interested. All you'll have to do is change the List ID on line 47 and instead of "ALTER PROCEDURE" you'd want to do "CREATE PROCEDURE" on line 9.
One thing to note, this procedure just merges one half of the list with the other... so either keep executing until you're down to one. Or you can write a script that will loop this procedure until the list count is one.
Thanks!