Guest Accounts

Guest accounts are a way for users to interact with the application without needing to create an account. This is useful for users who want to browse the application and add items to their cart without needing to create an account.

Guests are treated the same as a normal User account; they can have Carts, Orders, Transactions, and even Subscriptions. The only difference is that they can only access their account from the browser they used when they were a guest.

Cookies

For guest Users, they have a unique Cookie that is tied to the their browser to aid in identifying them when they complete actions; such as adding items to a cart.

However, if the User clears their cookies, they will lose any tracked information that was stored in the cookie.

Orders

When a guest completes a purchase and an Order is created, the order cannot be tied to the guest's cookie.

Conduit will create a Guest account for them, using the email address provided during checkout, and tie the Order to that Guest account.

The unique identifier added to every Order is the guest's cookie UUID used to identify the guest.

Guest Account Dashboard

Every guest User has a Guest Account Dashboard that they can access to view their Cart and past Orders (tied to their browser cookie).

The Guest Account Dashboard is accessible by visiting the /guest route. This dashboard is only accessible to non-authenticated Users and displays all Orders and Subscriptions and links to the Cart and your application's homepage route, i.e. /.

You can add analytics to the Guest Account Dashboard to track guest User behavior by providing either a Google Analytics ID or a Fathom Analytics ID in your .env file or in the config/conduit.php file.

Click here to view examples of the Guest Account Dashboard's display or, since this site is built with Conduit, you can view your Guest Account Dashboard by visiting this route: /guest.

Guest to User Syncing

If a guest User decides to create an account after they have added items to their cart or completed a purchase and they are on the same browser with their cookie, Conduit will display a prompt on the Guest's Account Dashboard asking if they would like to sync their Guest account with their new User account.