What to ask your agency about guest checkout

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on guest checkout, these questions are worth asking early.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Forcing account creation is a top cause of abandonment. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Most people will make one anyway if the order went well. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What this looks like day to day

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. 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 any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.