Five mistakes teams make with guest checkout

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit guest checkout.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Warning signs

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Forcing account creation is a top cause of abandonment
• Offer the account after the purchase, not before
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Most people will make one anyway if the order went well. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Where to go from here

In practice

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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.