Thanks for the explanation of “orphans”. That all makes sense. However, when I start to think about it logically, since we don’t use logins on our site, any purchase made is going to end up being an “orphan” regardless of whether it is a “guest” record or a “customer” record. Additionally, due to the nature of the products we sell, the vast majority of our customers are one-time-only purchasers. Which would make them functionally equivalent to an “orphan”, anyway. So perhaps you could give me an idea of the performance difference between “guest” and “customer” records.
As for why we would prefer the use of “customer” records, most of the reasons are due to the push-notifications that we receive from the Stripe app, throughout the day. I understand that the Stripe app has nothing to do with your plug-in, but the change to “guest” records has made the push-notifications much less useful for our daily workflow. So being able to revert to the “old” way, and create “customer” records again, would be beneficial to us. However, I don’t want to revert to the “old” way if it is eventually going to cause significant performance issues. Which is why I asked for some enlightenment on that front.
Ideally, when a purchase is made on our site, it would do a customer look-up in Stripe and if it found a customer with the exact same name and e-mail address, then it would associate the new purchase with that customer record. And if no match was found, then it would create a new customer record for the purchase. This would eliminate “orphans” and keep the performance impact to a minimum.