How guest customers are handled
Updated September 15, 2026
Customers who check out without creating an account are treated as full customers throughout the plugin. They are identified by the billing email address on their orders, appear in the customers list and the search, and get a complete report of their own.
Where guests appear
- In the customers list, with a Guest badge in place of a username and a dash for the ID.
- In the customer search, labelled (guest) in the suggestions.
- As a full report, including orders, products, coupons, shipping, payments and attribution.
- In CSV exports, labelled by email address in the file name.
Guests are found using the WooCommerce customer lookup table, where a guest is recorded as a row with no user ID. A guest can only be found once they have placed at least one order.
What guests do not have
- Profile fields – there is no account to read from, so the billing and shipping addresses and phone number on the report come from their most recent order.
- Activity log – account activity needs an account. Their Activity tab explains this and points to their order history.
- Registration date – replaced with a note that they checked out as a guest.
Guest carts are supported, but only once the customer has entered their email address at checkout, since that is the only thing that links a guest session back to a person.
Merging guest orders into an account
When Merge Guest Orders is enabled, which is the default, a registered customer’s report also includes guest orders placed with the same email address. This catches the common case of someone ordering as a guest and later creating an account, which would otherwise leave those earlier orders off every report on the store.
The customers list uses the same rule, so a customer’s order count and spend there match their report, and the guest entry is hidden so the same person is not listed twice.
Turn the setting off to keep them separate. A guest report never picks up a registered customer’s orders in either direction, so the two can never be confused.
Actions on guest customers
Pro coupon generation and email sending both work for guests. In each case the email address is resolved against a real order on your store before anything happens, so neither feature can be used to target an address that has never bought from you.