How to get guest checkout right
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The short answer to guest checkout is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
What it costs to ignore
Forcing account creation is a top cause of abandonment. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Offer the account after the purchase, not before
- Most people will make one anyway if the order went well
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Most people will make one anyway if the order went well. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Turning this into a decision
What this looks like day to day
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
- Offer the account after the purchase, not before — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.