That does sound cumbersome, @CVT ! An email address is the unique identifier for a customer account, and only one email address can be associated with a customer account. So the easiest way tosearch for a customer on the POS is by their email address. That being said, the POS shouldn’t be creating duplicate accounts for the same customer, unless they’ve given different email addresses each time they’ve purchased. Have you checked to see if this is the case with each duplicated account? Let me know what you find out, and if there are duplicates of customers with the same email address, we certainly need to look into this further for you.
In regards to the customer using different credit cards, the POS can detect a card that was previously used. It doesn’t save/store the card details anywhere, but rather it depends on what information is made available by the customer’s bank. That’s why you may have noticed that on some orders that were made as a guest through your POS (meaning without an account), show the customer’s name on the order; The information is being provided from the customer’s bank, since that card was used previously. The credit card used for online orders on the other hand, are mostly impacted when using Shop Pay, since the Shopify checkout does not store customer’s credit card information. A customer’s Shop Pay account is separate from their Customer account for your store.
Moving forward, I have submitted a feature request now on your behalf for merging customer accounts when multiple email addresses are used. Although I can’t promise when or if this feature will be implemented, I recommend keeping an eye on the Shopify Changelog. All recent updates to the platform are posted here, so this will be the best place to find out about any updates regarding the ability to merge customer accounts.
Let me know if I can help with anything else!