Checkout without account registration

mramoeba · August 16

So here is my follow up to our private email discussion with the site admin.

I discussed with my business partner the extra barrier we have towards new buyers. They can open a cart but before going to the address and payment during the checkout process they must register an account. This forced registration turns down most buyers in Denmark, we rather close the page and go back to google and try to find another webshop where we can go straight to checkout and place the order without having an account. Of course all webshops have the option to register an user account by ticking a box but that is optional. The customer fills out anyway the name, address, email and phone number as these are needed for package registration, label purchase.

I am thinking about to pay for white label service targeting local customers therefore it would be great if this forced registration would not be present only optional at least there so the checkout process would be familiar to my local customers.

Maybe admin could create a poll? I am nost sure how it works to find out the opinion of the wider BO community.

mfav · August 16

I'd like to chime in and say that this reluctance to "create an account" is a real thing. I encountered it years ago when doing site development.

There is no procedural difference in entering information to "check out" or "create an account" as the customer enters exactly the same information, and the information is captured by the web site.

But *labelling* the process as "creating an account" does something to the psyche of some visitors.

The problem was solved here by simply removing the "create account" language and changing the checkout process to include "returning customer" labelling.

Never saw a problem with returning customers "signing in"…but that "create account" language generated all sorts of vitriol.

FWIW

mramoeba · August 16

mfav
The language / way of communicating the process might be the solution.

In general people hate making decisions, and to create an account is not only requiring a decision but a long lasting commitment (psychologically feels like that even thoughit takes a minute to delete the account). Personally I dislike this method a lot, I would like to say yes to an account only after that I tried and tested the shopping experience with a positive result.
But yeah, maybe it just need a different name / title.

Lawrence · August 17

We have implemented a basic guest checkout. We will trial this on the whitelabel stores to start with before we roll this out to other stores. We will need to think about how to deal with blocked users. We also will need to implement a process to convert the guest account into a normal account at the end of the checkout process.