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

I doubt there are any perfect solutions to this problem. You simply have to make a choice: How important is it to guarantee recognizable customer history in contrast to the improvement in conversions you get from not forcing a customer to go through a full registration process.

If you go without forcing registration, you will not be able to recognize returning customers 100% of the time. One might argue that even with registration that will not be possible, as users sometimes choose to create new accounts for various reasons. But you might be able to do something that's "good enough" by understanding the data you already have.

For example, in some countries, postcodes are quite specific. Are they specific enough? Depends in which countries you operate and also how your customer base is built. If you tend to only have one user per household, maybe.

Or depending on which payment methods you support, you might consider building a one-way hash of the credit card number ("pseudo-unique ID"). Some payment solutions actually do return a unique "payer ID", which could be perfect -- assuming that you get something from all the payment services you support.