Guest customers
The Customer object represents a customer of your business, and it helps tracking subscriptions and payments that belong to the same customer.
Checkout supports passing in a customer to enable you to prefill customer information on the Checkout page and to associate the payment or subscription with a specific customer.
If you don’t pass in a customer, you can set customer_creation to configure whether or not Checkout automatically creates a Customer object when the session is confirmed.
Sessions that don’t create Customers are associated with guest customers instead. Guest customers are automatically grouped in the Stripe Dashboard based on having used the same card, email, or phone to make payments. This unified view helps you review purchasing behavior, refunds, chargebacks, or fraud.
Frequently asked questions
I noticed several guest payments under a guest customer. How do you group these payments under the same guest customer?
We use credit card number as the unique identifier to group credit card payments of your guest customers under the same guest identity. See this page for additional details on the matching logic.
What happens if the same credit card was used by different guest customers—for example, two spouses using the same credit card to checkout at different times?
All guest payments for that credit card will show up grouped together under one guest customer. Since we group by credit card, we assume they are the same guest customer.
I don’t see any guest customers under the Guests tab on my Customers page. Why is that?
This is expected if your Stripe integration is always passing a Customer ID when creating Checkout Sessions. Guest customers are only created for payments without a specific Customer object associated with them.
Should I update my privacy policy or other privacy notices?
You’re in the best position to know whether this feature is consistent with your privacy policy or other privacy notices. It’s a good practice to review your privacy notices and privacy policy in consideration of any new feature. Guest customers are intended to give you a view of your existing guest data, which can help you better detect fraud and help you manage customer service inquiries.