Matching Customers helps you identify existing customers when importing new ones.
This Chapter covers some general concepts, some of which apply to manual imports, and many of which are for automated imports from ecommerce, etc, that have quirks.
Customer Maps for imports or ecommerce connections find existing customers during import to avoid duplicates and keep up Customer History, which is nice for marketing.
Automatic settings for ecommerce bring in new Customers and new Orders and match any existing Customers by email address to avoid adding them again or to update them.
Create your own maps to bring in any data you need and match existing customers by fields other than email address. Get all help you need from support@bigbusiness.com.
Update Indexes is one of the benefits of automation. A possible search is now in code. The benefit of a new index is now certain. Matching Customers is one such situation.
Selling through retail ecommerce like Amazon or Ebay you may accumulate 100,000+ Customers and you may not be given a temporary email address (abc123@ebay.com).
Matching Customers adds matching for Name + Address, which are now indexed, too.
Customer Matching is updated on Imports to include Update Customers and Listing.
Use Suffix helps with Customer Matching by adding options like Begins With Search.
Folder Connect includes Use Suffix in Multi-Customer for Listing + Ship To lookups. Use Suffix changes the Ship To search to Begins With so ABC finds ABC - Store 123.