A practical checklist for guest checkout

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Run through this the next time guest checkout comes up.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The checklist

• Forcing account creation is a top cause of abandonment
• Offer the account after the purchase, not before
• Most people will make one anyway if the order went well
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What it costs to ignore

Forcing account creation is a top cause of abandonment. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

How to tell if yours is fine

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Three things worth confirming about guest checkout before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Most people will make one anyway if the order went well — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.