A short guide to guest checkout

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Everything we would tell a client about guest checkout in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

The reason this keeps coming up

Forcing account creation is a top cause of abandonment. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What good looks like

Offer the account after the purchase, not before. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Warning signs

Most people will make one anyway if the order went well. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What this looks like day to day

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. 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.