"Ghost" customer while using ecommerce pay end point

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Chris H asked Dec 5, '20 David Marginian Deactivated commented Dec 12, '20

"Ghost" customer while using ecommerce pay end point

I'm having an issue in the sandbox with our work flow creating an additional customer record after using the ecommerce v1/order/<order id>/pay endpoint AND then swapping all items to the new customer record (yes i know this sounds odd).

We are using the following flow:

1. I'm creating a token with the token endpiont and the following object "v1/tokens", returning a source token to assign to a customer and use for payment later.

brand (i.e DISCOVER)
number
cvv
exp_month
exp_year

2. I'm creating a customer record with the ecommerce endpoint "V1/customers"

ecomind = "ecom",
email
firstName
lastName
name = firstName + lastName,
source (from step 1)
phone

this is what the customer record looks like

{

"href": "https://sandbox.dev.clover.com/v3/merchants/9QPTP66T7X9BE/customers/ATKQP7YRZCP86",

"id": "ATKQP7YRZCP86", <-- customer id

"firstName": "Harrison,",

"lastName": "Chris",

"marketingAllowed": false,

"customerSince": 1607195931000,

"cards": {

"elements": [

{

"id": "BHGPQP7Q006NP",

"first6": "601136",

"last4": "6668",

"cardType": "DISCOVER",

"token": "clv_1TSTSzjCMwRejX2zS2915z8v", < --- token I'm using

"tokenType": "CTOKEN",

"modifiedTime": 1607195931000,

"customer": {

"id": "ATKQP7YRZCP86"

}

.....

3. I'm creating the order with the ecommerce endpoint with the following object "v1/orders"

items[]
currency = "usd",
customer = customer id (from step 2)
email

this is what the response order object looks like

{

"id": "SG9PKV9CYKNBE",

"object": "order",

"amount": 425,

"currency": "USD",

"customer": "ATKQP7YRZCP86", <---- customer id from step 2

"items": [

{

"quantity": 1,

"amount": 100,

"description": "BarGuard Application Hold"

},

{

"parent": "0DCE3GPZT46E4",

"amount": 5,

"description": "Pizza",

"tax_rates": [

{

"name": "Ohio 6.5 % Sales Tax",

"rate": 650000

}

]

},

.....

4. At this point the merchant adds the line items (our app is not handling line item additions)

5. I've trying paying with both customer and source token "/v1/orders/<order id from step 3>/pay" and the following object:

ecomind": "ecom",
source: <source from step 1>
tip_amount

AND

ecomind: "ecom",
customer: <customer id from step 2>,
tip_amount

Paying this way i end up with an additonional customer object like below (../v3/merchants/{ {merchant_id}}/customers?expand=cards):

{

"elements": [

{

"href": "https://sandbox.dev.clover.com/v3/merchants/9QPTP66T7X9BE/customers/6K4CS0TRG75QW",

"id": "6K4CS0TRG75QW", <-- New customer created

"marketingAllowed": false,

"customerSince": 1607197044000,

"cards": {

"elements": [

{

"id": "9ZPQDHPZ3RARP",

"token": "7297162975886668",

"tokenType": "MULTIPAY",

"modifiedTime": 1607197043000,

"customer": {

"id": "6K4CS0TRG75QW"

}

]

}

},

{

"href": "https://sandbox.dev.clover.com/v3/merchants/9QPTP66T7X9BE/customers/ATKQP7YRZCP86",

"id": "ATKQP7YRZCP86", < ----- Old customer never charged

"firstName": "Harrison,",

"lastName": "Chris",

"marketingAllowed": false,

"customerSince": 1607195931000,

"cards": {

"elements": [

{

"id": "BHGPQP7Q006NP",

"first6": "601136",

"last4": "6668",

"cardType": "DISCOVER",

"token": "clv_1TSTSzjCMwRejX2zS2915z8v",

"tokenType": "CTOKEN",

"modifiedTime": 1607195931000,

"customer": {

"id": "ATKQP7YRZCP86"

}

]

}

],

"href": "http://apisandbox.dev.clover.com/v3/merchants/9QPTP66T7X9BE/customers?limit=100"

}

e-commerce api

ghost-customer-created-with-ecommerce-endpoint-v1.png (31.9 KiB)

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Answer 1 · 2020-12-05T20:45:59Z

David Marginian Deactivated answered Dec 5, '20 David Marginian Deactivated commented Dec 12, '20

I haven't looked into this in detail, but are you certain the ghost customer is being created as part of the payment of this order? There is nearly 20 minutes between the customer since times of each customer.

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Chris H commented · Dec 11, 2020 at 09:03 PM

Hi david, we have around 10 locations signed up for our app and this issue has broken our app. In the issue above you reference two workarounds. One reassigning the order to the customer after the order is paid, and the following:

It looks like in addition to passing in the customer when you create the order, you also need to pass it in when you pay for the order. Otherwise, it appears the server is creating a brand new/empty customer for the order and overwriting the customer you set when you created the order.

can you show me what my post object should look like to the ecom payment endpoint for this option? i've tried passing the customer id as the source object and i still end up with a new ghost shell customer?

works but creates ghost customer shell

customer = {customerid}

tip_amount = {tip amount}

works but creates ghost customer shell

source = {customerid}

tip_amount = {tip amount}

returns bad request

customer = {customerid}

source = {card_token}

tip_amount = {tip amount}

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David Marginian ♦♦ Chris H commented · Dec 11, 2020 at 10:00 PM

The symptom the other poster was trying to solve was different. They wanted to see the customer associated with the order, not avoid the ghost. You want to avoid the ghost, the workarounds I posted won't avoid the ghost (the ghost will be created until our fix is in production which will be in January).

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Chris H David Marginian ♦♦ commented · Dec 12, 2020 at 07:53 PM

Ok thanks for your attention David. Yeah in our instance we are creating customers on the behalf of the clover merchant. I can do the reassignment but don't want to dump a bunch of empty shells into their datastore.

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Answer 2 · 2020-12-05T22:37:39Z

Chris H answered Dec 5, '20 David Marginian Deactivated commented Dec 7, '20

Hi David, yeah its definitely at the time of payment (..v1/order/<orderid>/pay) that the customer is created (and line items swapped). I did look at the end point documentation. I've tried with no email and with email, custid and no custid, with source and without source.

The delay is just time I took for accumulate all of the documentation in hopes of having everything needed to figure out what's going on. Sorry for such a long question but I'm really at a loss on this one.

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David Marginian ♦♦ commented · Dec 05, 2020 at 11:12 PM

Ok, I will look into it in the next few days.

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David Marginian ♦♦ David Marginian ♦♦ commented · Dec 06, 2020 at 02:55 PM

A very similar issue was actually previously reported:

https://community.clover.com/questions/26748/customer-name-not-display-on-live-clover-dashboard.html

If you retrieve the order after you pay, is the old (expected) or new (ghost) customer associated with it?

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Chris H David Marginian ♦♦ commented · Dec 07, 2020 at 02:59 PM

when i retrieve the order the new "ghost" customer is associated with the order. The "Name Unknown" customer has all of the line items assigned after payment. This appears to be the same issue.

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