Getting started with guest checkout
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A short on-ramp to guest checkout for teams who have not touched it before.
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.
Why it matters
Forcing account creation is a top cause of abandonment. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Offer the account after the purchase, not before
- Change one thing and measure it
Most people will make one anyway if the order went well. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
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
- Forcing account creation is a top cause of abandonment — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.