What is the big issue with creating accounts for people? Why should it not just be totally automated?

For example, on completing a purchase, the customer is emailed a temporary password and an option to activate their “account” in order to review product / shipping status and personal information held. It could be seamless!

After all, once a transaction is completed, surely this information is going to be held by the company anyway. Is there some US legal requirement that I am not aware of?

Thank you Bryan for another insightful post.

One low cost shopping cart that can be configured to skip login entirely is Digishop.

It is rediculous for a web merchant to expect everyone will be a repeat customer and need a login.

X-Cart does allow for anonymous checkout. There is also a new player in open-source e-commerce that has the option – Magento.

I made this very obvious point to our IT development team three years ago, and after much yelling I was able to get the “log in” page changed. Instead of a threatening log in dialog box a user is given the choice to either log in OR create an account. This simple change resulted in a huge scenario conversion increase. I agree, removing the step completely will further increase conversion, no doubt, but that’s another project.

I made this very obvious point to our IT development team three years ago, and after much yelling and screaming I was able to get the “log in” page changed. Instead of a treatening log in dialog box a user is given the choice to either log in OR create an account. This simple change resulted in a huge scenario conversion increase. I agree, removing the step completely will further increase conversion, no doubt, but that’s another project.

Why? I believe you said it best. “On most retail sites, you just uncheck the check box and avoid their e-mails. This one used radio buttons, altering the standard experience by having me choose just one”. That is why. It causes one to pause for a moment and either accept or reject based on the merit of the particular email being promoted rather then a habitual rejection based on the merit of previously encountered emails. It gives the email marketer a chance to persuade. The problem with the example shown is that “Yes, I would like to receive e-mail from Schwan’s.” “No, please don’t send me e-mail.” is not giving anything back to customer in terms of information in exchange for the few seconds of dedicated attention provided, to consider opting to receive the email. As in your case, it is annoying. For that you had keep me up?! You could have just allowed me to unucheck! It is just a roadblock. In addition, it also missed out on the opportunity to persuade. However, if there is real value in receiving a particular email, using radio buttons is a good way for getting one’s attention long enough to persuade or create momentum (link to a sample email etc). Then even if one declines to opt-in, it wasn’t just a roadblock. It was a conversation.

That is a testable hypothesis and you may well be correct. What I can tell you is that it is not the only way to deal with insincere and fraudulent buyers.

That is exactly the point. There are times when it really makes sense. It seems to in your case and in our case study with CafePress where we lowered their shopping cart abandonment from an already low 35% to only 15% abandonment. As you point out though, you thought about it, measured it and understand the impact. How many of your online retail colleagues do you think did the same?

The Registration process is nothing of the sort! It is usually just the collection of Name, address and e-mail details but done on a badly named “Registration Page” as opposed to a more friendly “Personal Details” page. The data collected is the same overall but the early software creates a barrier to sales completion by making it seem unfriendly or cumbersome.

Get your software re-configured or at least use friendly language to stop the customer being put off by having details extracted from them before they have got WHAT THEY WANT, they are the paying customer here.

Great topic

This feature or configuration certainly irritates me and I know what is going on.

Zencart, MonsterCommerce, Xcart and some of the popular one’s do require to register first.

Or as the case to be with small business – they try to do everything themselves and simply lack the knowledge to do it right …

1. The etailer is using a shopping cart solution that has pre-checkout registration a default and has not considered how that impacts usability. They’re not tracking analytics and funnel abandonment so they’ve never spotted the problem.

2. It was a developer oversight. Often times businesses will hire web developers who are not schooled in ecommerce usability. The developers may also be limited by the platform of choice. As much as I think Drupal is a great and flexible open source CMS, its ecommerce functionality, especially with older versions, can be quite inflexible.

3. The e-commerce store prefers to harvest data for marketing purposes.

4. To simplify accounting procedures, they take the trade-off.

5. One of the worst cases is when e-stores require registration because they only show pricing to registered users.