Capture Email address of Guest checkout

-- HikaShop version -- : 4.2.3
-- Joomla version -- : 3.9.16
-- PHP version -- : 7.3.15

Is there a "proper" way to store the Email address entered in the Guest checkout area in the cart? We have many abandoned carts we want to try and contact, but if they aren't logged in or didn't attempt to register, there is no contact information available.

We have our cart set up by default for Guest checkout as we've found that we lose people on the registration. We prompt for the email address before they can continue with the checkout process...its at that point we'd like to store the email address they entered for that session into the cart somehow. I see fields for cart_params and cart_fields and thought maybe we could capture the email address from the data[register] and make it part of the cart data. Or is there a better way of doing this?[email] and make it part of the cart data.

Or is there a better way of doing this?

We have Guest Checkout only and have enabled registration after checkout.

What we have is a bunch of carts without the ability to track down the person who may have added the items to their cart during a session.

I keep carts for 7 days, and have about 50 or so that I would like to find a way to contact the session visitor back and get them back to the site to complete the purchase. (we used to have hundreds until I implemented your recaptcha!! p.s. Thank you!). But of the legitimate ones, it looks like we have the opportunity to capture the email address from the Guest portion of the checkout page.

What I did for testing was write a custom piece that added the cart id and the email address provided into a test table to see if it were possible (by me--not a coder). It works, but I was wondering if there was a way to associate the captured email address within the cart table itself. Then I can run a custom query in Acyba to send out a reminder. (Otherwise the reminder system doesn't work unless we open up registration or force login).

Is that making sense? Sorry if I'm bad an explaining this.

If we used Registration, Simple Registration, or Simple Register w/Password, I understand.

But will Guest Checkout do the same thing without going through the registration process? Or only after the order is saved?

Wait! No wonder you can't follow me, 'cause I'm all over the place Sorry.

Instead of a single page check out, I placed the Email address (Guest Checkout) at the front of the check out process and separated the shipping/payment portion onto the next page. The user now has to click Next before proceeding. Until then I wasn't getting the Email address in the cart table. Now when they click next their email is captured (wrong or right). So I was over-complicating matters by trying to simply the checkout.

For our event registration system I"m working on a way we can use Elastic Email (our SMTP provider) to validate the email address before leaving the email field on that system. If I can get it to work, maybe I can employ that here as well. But 99% of our cart checkouts are initiated through the event registration anyway, but that doesn't stop them from entering the wrong email address on checkout...only using 2-step registration/activation link will do that. If I didn't get so many complaints from visitors not wanting to create an account I would have focused on the registration only angle anyway and forced validation.

As always, thank you.