WineDirect categorizes customers using the following "Contact Status":
1st Time Customer
Repeat Customer
Club Member
Prospect
Blank
This information is included in Wine Direct order detail, but sometimes this field is blank for some orders. WinePulse uses this Contact Status to determine Customer Type. Any order with a [Blank] Contact Status is shown as "Other" Customer Type in WinePulse reporting.
A brief explanation of these Contact Statuses is provided below, but please refer to WineDirect's documentation for more detail on how WineDirect classifies contacts.
--------------------------
1st Time Customer
Has email address
$+ order value
1 order
(If a Guest Customer Order is Held and then Resumed on the POS, it creates a "No Name" Customer, which WineDirect classifies as a 1st Time Customer. Can also be a prospect who buys for first time or is a Quick Add on the POS has created a contact before check out).
Repeat Customer
Customer with a Contact record (email, name etc), who is not a current Club Member and has 2+ orders. Could be a cancelled Club Member.
[Blank] Customer
Likely to be a Guest Customer. Order was not put on hold as no contact was created prior to checkout. Order value can be >$0. Email address for receipt not given. WineDirect Contact not created. Billing Name within the order may have been pulled from credit card but no contact will be created for that order. In WinePulse these are displayed as "Other".
Prospect
May/may not have email address
$0+ order value
Note: it is possible for a Prospect to have a single order, which has some value. One business scenario that gives this result is when an email address was provided for a receipt for a "Guest Customer" (after the order is processed and marked complete.) In this case the WineDirect LTV and Contact Status is not updated in the customer statistics/data. These types of order will have a blank Contact Status and will appear in the Other customer WinePulse bucket. A second order under this contact would convert Contact Status to "Repeat Customer". See additional notes at the bottom of this article.
Entering a name/email Address after processing the order for an email receipt WILL result in a new contact being created BUT since the new contact is created AFTER the order transaction is processed, it will not consider the order as the "first transaction" and therefore the customer is not marked as 1st time customer (the email receipt dialog appears after the order has been processed). Note that in WinePulse reporting on these type of orders WinePulse updates the customer order record and displays these customer orders correctly as 1st Time Customer.
----------------------------------------------
Additional Information on WineDirect order processing
If a Guest Customer order is put on hold, that action changes the Contact Status to be "Prospect or 1st time customer" but instead of the name being Guest Customer it will show with “no name”. WineDirect has a POS feature called “Clear Contact” (released March 2019) which allows changes to be made to a resumed held order and this allows a “No Name” contact to be converted back to show the name as Guest Customer.