Duplicate contacts

Hello, I’m hoping somewhere out there someone will be able to help me.

I noticed in late December that we started seeing an increase in duplicate records appearing in our account. I have asked support and they are pointing me towards an error with the way we have the API set up but I’m beginning to question this.

To give a bit of background, contacts get into our account three ways:

  1. We run a cron every 5 mins which sends data up directly into InfusionSoft using the InfusionSoft API.
  2. We have Zendesk linked with InfusionSoft through MyFusion Notes
  3. We use Zapier to link our Facebook Lead Ads with our account.

Mostly our duplicates seem to be getting created through route 1.

When we send up data about new opportunities new contacts are getting created twice (with each record containing one opportunity) but for existing contacts it is creating two new opportunities in the existing record.

I suspected that there is a GET call at the start of the API to check to see if a contact’s email address is already present in InfusionSoft but we are receiving two responses which is triggering the action we want performed twice. Whether that is because we are sending the call twice or somehow InfusionSoft are sending us two responses, I don’t know. No one seems to be able to provide me an answer.

Any help would be gratefully appreciated as I am having to spend several hours a day deduping, merging, checking the data in our system and resetting campaigns.

If you have a CRON job that’s running code then the code should be checking for these duplicates, which is quite easy to do. I code integrations all the time and use cron jobs which require identifying if you are creating new or updating existing records. I would be looking at the code that is running and why it’s not doing that.

You might find more traction for a post like this in the API Q&A btw :wink: