Originally Posted by
needainstall
I'm not sure where that is coming from. All I can tell you is that I have never, ever, ever had anyone - accountant, business attorney, or anyone else - even comment about our random order numbers.
In fact, my companies (all US based) have been selling online since '96, have processed hundreds of thousands of orders accounting for millions of dollars of product sold, and I have never even heard a mention in any way about any sort of necessity for consecutive order numbers until this very thread.
We sell and process orders from many sites. All our orders are then grouped together into a backend order entry system. Our orders Have Never had any sort of consecutive numbering.
Many of the larger online retailers also use random order ids. It makes logical business sense in a number of ways.
Of course, if this is something that matters to you. you could easily insert an additional field in the orders table, and set it to autoincrement. This could be coded so that this number is visible only to you in admin and so it also prints out on your invoices. You could then use that for your consecutive number. This way your customer sees a random number, can still access their order via the random number, you can access their order via the random number, but you also have a consecutive numbering scheme available should you have the need.
For me, anyway, since this is not now nor has it ever been a problem, and I don't really have the time to implement anything further, I will stick to the simple random increment numbering fix I already have working.
I would be interested though in finding out why you believe there could be a problem in using random order numbers.
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