Guest checkout

Guest checkout is the option to buy from an online shop without creating an account first. The buyer fills in what is needed to complete the order, pays, and leaves without choosing a password. It is a setting in almost every shop platform and it is turned off more often than it should be.

In short

• It lets somebody buy without registering first.
• You still collect everything you need to fulfil the order.
• Forced registration is one of the largest causes of abandoned baskets.
• The account is better offered after the sale than demanded before it.

What it is, and what it is not

A checkout needs a small number of facts: who is buying, where it goes, how it is paid for. Guest checkout collects those and nothing else.

An account adds one thing on top: a password, and with it a record the customer can log back into. It is easy to assume the account is where the customer information lives, and on most platforms that is not true. The order holds the name, the email address and the delivery address whether or not anybody registered.

So the choice is not between having customer data and not having it. It is between asking for a password now, asking later, or not asking at all.

Why forced registration costs sales

Somebody who has reached your checkout has already done the hard part. They found you, chose something, and decided to pay. A registration form at that moment is the one obstacle that arrives after the decision has been made.

It fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the product.

• It reads as commitment. A first-time buyer wants one thing, not a relationship with your shop.
• It is another password. Most people are already managing more than they can remember, and know it.
• It looks like a data grab. Registration before purchase suggests the account is for your benefit rather than theirs, and it usually is.
• It doubles the form. Details get typed once for the account and again for delivery, which reads as carelessness.
• It breaks on a phone. A verification email in the middle of a checkout means leaving the shop, opening a mail app and finding the way back. Many do not.

Every one of these turns a full basket into cart abandonment, and the sale is lost after the shop has already paid for the visitor that produced it. That is the expensive kind of loss.

What you actually give up

Very little, and it is worth being specific about what it is.

You do not get a password. You do not get a login the customer can return through. You may find it slightly harder to link two orders from the same person if they used different email addresses, which matters for measuring customer lifetime value but does not affect either order.

That is the whole list. Reordering, order tracking, returns, receipts and marketing all work perfectly well from an order number and an email address, and most shops already handle them that way for customers who have forgotten their password anyway.

Offering the account afterwards

The pattern that keeps both things is simple and widely used. Let the purchase finish as a guest. On the confirmation screen, offer to save the details for next time, with the details already filled in so accepting takes one click.

The timing is the whole trick. Before the purchase, an account is a demand made of a stranger. After it, it is a convenience offered to a customer, and the customer has just demonstrated that they trust you enough to hand over money. The people who say yes at that point are the people who intended to come back, which is exactly the group an account is useful for.

Keep the offer honest. Saving details for next time and joining a mailing list are two different agreements, and merging them into one tick box is how a shop teaches people not to trust its tick boxes.

Where it still needs care

Guest checkout is close to a free improvement, and there are three places it needs a little attention instead of none.

• The confirmation has to be excellent. A guest has no account to log back into, so the confirmation email is the only record they hold. It needs the order number, what was bought, what happens next and a way to reach a human being. A shop with a weak confirmation feels careless whether or not anybody registered.
• Typed email addresses go wrong. Without a verification step, a mistyped address means the customer never receives anything and assumes the order failed. Showing the address back for confirmation before the order is placed catches most of it.
• The same person appears twice. Two orders under two spellings of the same address are two customers as far as your records are concerned. This affects reporting rather than service, and it is a reason to match on email address where you can, and not a reason to demand a password.

None of these is an argument for forced registration. They are the small amount of work that replaces it.

Words you will hear

• One-page checkout. A checkout where the steps sit on a single screen rather than across several.
• Express checkout. Paying through a wallet or a saved payment method that skips most of the form.
• Order number. The reference that lets a guest find their order later.
• Abandonment rate. The share of started checkouts that were never finished.
• Account creation rate. How many buyers register, which is a number to measure after you make it optional, not before.

Guest checkout is one of the few changes to an online shop that costs almost nothing to make and can be measured within a fortnight. Turn it on, make it the default path rather than the second option, and let the product page and the delivery do the work of bringing people back.