+1 to that idea. I'll put it on my todo list and accept a patch in the meantime that clears out any order that's in checkout. I don't know exactly where the option should go, though, as it would be somewhat difficult to integrate that into the actual order admin table.

Any news about that? It will be very useful.

This is a very good thought. We send emails to all people who abandon their carts in-checkout and about 50% endup calling us to complete their order. The number on reasons why people were leaving our cart was frustration when one error would cause unrelated data to get dropped. Lyle recently made some great fixes for this. so we will see if conversion rate improves. There is no question that contacting your in-checkout customers is just good customer service.

In-checkout is a necessary stage in the checkout process but I suppose it might make sense to let an admin decide if they are retained or auto deleted. I'll reiterate that in our case as many as 50% of the in-checkout orders are closed with a little customer service work on our part. There are sales that would be lost if cron autodeleted them.