Duplicate checking settings on shopping cart orders needs to be changeable

When you make a form of some kind, you can set duplicate contact checking settings. You can set it to check based on email, names, etc, or any combination. My specific needs is that duplicate contact checking is made on email only, then all other fields are updated when a duplicate is found.

The problem is that the duplicate checking setting on the shopping cart cannot be changed:

Unlike the other forms, an order’s duplicate checker settings cannot be edited - they are preset to check by First Name, Last Name, and Email Address.

https://help.infusionsoft.com/help/when-does-the-system-automatically-merge-contacts

What?! This creates a lack of consistent behavior in the software. If I want email only duplicate checking, then I’m going to end up with duplicates when people order in the shopping cart, but happen to use a different name. A customer named Michael may feel like entering Mike this time, for example, and they have no expectation that this will make their experience with my company more difficult.

If you have an urgent need for contact duplicates to be merged, say, a membership site based on email address, then your customers will inadvertently create duplicate contact ids, all with the same email address. This is pretty crazy, because now when they log in to your site, let’s say right after buying an add-on to their membership, it might show only their old membership status, or only just the add-on, or nothing at all, because the membership site doesn’t expect a database with duplicates. Now I’ll get emails from upset customers because of something that should be automated in the first place. Their order should have been duplicate checked against my settings, not an unchangeable default.

I’m posting this to bring attention to what looks like an oversight. Consistency in duplicate checking is expected, not merely preferred. I ask the IS dev team to please fix this soon.

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I’m sorry @DVM, but that information isn’t accurate. I’ll request that it gets updated. There is a setting on order forms to change the duplicate checking. I also ran a test on a shopping cart transaction and it looks like it is “email only” I placed two orders with the same email address and different first names and it did not create a new contact record.

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Thank you for the reply. I’ll try out my own tests like you suggest and let you know what I find. I do know that I still get duplicates sometimes, so they’re coming from somewhere.

Hello Martinc. I’m afraid the information you posted does not resolve the issue I’m referring to. The image you show is for an order form. Yes, I see you can change duplicate check settings for order forms.

However, you cannot change duplicate checking for the shopping cart.

I don’t use order forms. I use the shopping cart only. Customers click links like https://dvm.infusionsoft.com/app/manageCart/addProduct?productId=1996 and that updates the page https://dvm.infusionsoft.com/app/manageCart/showManageOrder. They fill their cart with items, then purchase. This shopping cart process of taking customer orders does not allow changes to the duplicate check settings.

I had a customer just a few days ago create a duplicate record with the exact same email, but they reversed their first and last name (She is asian heritage, where they sometimes do that). She had ordered something a year ago, creating her original record. She ordered something else a few days ago with the same email address but different names and it created a duplicate record. The problem I highlight in my original post occurred for her. She expected her access level on my site to change immediately after purchase, but the site gets confused and only loads the data based on one of the records, whichever it finds first, I guess. The result is that it looks like the purchase broke the site for her, or it looks like the purchase didn’t complete because the access didn’t change.

To fix this, I have to manually merge the two contacts.

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