What ways are there to store information about an anonymous/guest user in a database?

Question

Our application has an online shop among other features, and users are normally requested to register before completing a sale, creating a unique customer_ID in the

Answer 1

Assuming you require an e-mail address for all online orders, you could create a temporary account for every customer at the completion of each order when they are not logged in.

This can be done by using the shipping address and other information provided during checkout to fill in the account, and e-mailing a random temporary password to them (optionally flagging it to require changing on the first log-in, if that functionality is built into the website). This requires minimal effort on their part to setup the account, and allows them to sign in to check their order status.

Since the primary key in your database is the customer_id, it should not cause conflicts if they continue making new accounts with the same e-mail/address/etc, unless you have code in place to prevent duplicates already. It's rare for someone to create more than one temporary account though, since it's easier to log in with the password e-mailed to them than entering their data again.

For the backend orders, we generally create an account in the same way as above for every customer. However, if they don't have an e-mail address (or they only want to purchase by phone), we generate an account with their shipping information and a blank e-mail address (have to code an exception to not send temporary passwords/order confirmations when it's blank). The customer_id is given to them, and their shipping information and company name are stored in the account to look up and expedite future orders.