Why you should avoid enabling Guest checkout

[phrasespot]

PrestaShop has a guest checkout feature. I argue that you should never enable guest checkout in your shop. In steps below I am using standard, 5-page checkout, (the results are the same for 1-page chekout) and PrestaShop version 1.4.9.0.

 

Fubar 1

 

Timesaver. Let's first checkout by creating an account

 

1- Arrive at shop

2- Add an item to the cart and checkout

3- Create your account (providing email, first name, last name, password, Address, zip/postal code, city, country, phone number)

4- Select Carrier

5- Select Payment method

6- Confirm order

 

Now let's check out as a guest, this will hopefully save us some time and typing since we are checking out as guest:

 

1- Arrive at shop

2- Add an item to the cart and checkout

3- Instant checkout (providing email, first name, last name, password, Address, zip/postal code, city, country, phone number)

4- Select Carrier

5- Select Payment method

6- Confirm order

 

Nope, as a user I do not save any time or typing if using guest checkout.

 

Fubar 2

 

1- Arrive at shop

2- Add an item to the cart and checkout

3- Instant checkout (providing email, first name, last name, password, Address, zip/postal code, city, country, phone number)

Abort

 

A customer with given details added.

 

1- Arrive at shop

2- Add an item to the cart and checkout

3- Instant checkout (providing email, first name, last name, password, Address, zip/postal code, city, country, phone number)

Abort

 

Another customer with the same details are added

 

1- Arrive at shop

2- Add an item to the cart and checkout

3- Instant checkout (providing email, first name, last name, password, Address, zip/postal code, city, country, phone number)

Abort

 

Yet another customer with the same details are added. Ad infinitum....

 

Fubar 3

 

1- Arrive at shop

2- Add an item to the cart and checkout

3- Create your account (providing email, first name, last name, password, Address, zip/postal code, city, country, phone number)

4- Select Carrier

5- Select Payment method

6- Confirm order

 

Another account with the same details as the previously created guest accounts is created. Now I have 'several' guest customers with no orders and one non-guest customer with an order, all with exactly same details. But hopefully I will be able to combine these multiple accounts into one if I can transform these guest accounts to customer account. Nope, all I get is "A registered customer account exists with the same email address" for each guest account.

 

Fubar 4

 

Fresh start. Checking out as a guest.

 

1- Arrive at shop

2- Add an item to the cart and checkout

3- Instant checkout (providing email, first name, last name, password, Address, zip/postal code, city, country, phone number)

4- Select Carrier

5- Select Payment method

6- Confirm order

 

I receive an email saying "You can review this order and download your invoice from the "Order history" section of your account by clicking "My account" on our Website."

 

Huh? How? I have no order history. I have no My account. How do I see my order? There is no way as a guest to check anything related to my order. Time for a support call.

 

Fubar 5

 

But hold on, maybe if I create an account now I won't need to make that support call after all. Create an account providing the same details I provided in my previous checkout as a guest. Now surely it should show me something in my orders. Nope. apperently " have not placed any orders". So I will have to make that support call after all.

 

Fubar 6

 

Back office. Support call comes in. We now have a guest customer account with an order and a regular customer account with no order. This customer wants to track his order he placed as a guest. He also has created a regular customer account. Lets combine those and solve his issue. Nope. We are told "A registered customer account exists with the same email address" but no way to combine these customers or transfer the order to his non-guest account. We could cancel his order as a guest, delete his guest account, then he could re-place his order after logging in with his customer account credential. Hello? Oh... He hung up.

 

Fubar 7

 

How do you return an item purchased as a guest without a support call or email? You cannot.

 

Fubar 8

 

Use your own imagination and time to end up in even more twisted situations. The guest checkout is guest checkout in the name only. It does not save time or effort for your 'guests'. Confuses shop employees, records and customers. It is one of those PrestaShop features implemented so the relevant box can be checked in Wikipedia eCommerce cart comparison charts with zero thought going into it. Do yourself and your customers a favor and disable that abomination.

[Dh42]

Guest checkout in any program is a bad idea really. It doesn't save steps and it makes any kind of dealings with the shops hard to track. I do think this covers all carts with a guest checkout though.

[Mister Denial]

From a merchant point of view, the only reason I use the guest checkout option is because some customers don't like having to sign up for accounts, even if they absolutely do not save any time with guest checkout - or protect their privacy better. It's a psychological thing that does not make any sense.

 

What would be interesting would be to see the impact on revenue on having or NOT having guest accounts - but who's willing to play guinea pig with his shop?

[phrasespot]

From a merchant point of view, the only reason I use the guest checkout option is because some customers don't like having to sign up for accounts, even if they absolutely do not save any time with guest checkout - or protect their privacy better. It's a psychological thing that does not make any sense.

 

It actually kind of does. I would be willing to wager that those customers believe that the personal and financial details they are providing are not retained in contrast to when creating an account... and would not be very happy to find out that this is not the case.

 

What would be interesting would be to see the impact on revenue on having or NOT having guest accounts - but who's willing to play guinea pig with his shop?

So there is no misunderstanding, I am not against having 'a' guest checkout, I use guest checkout where available when shopping online. Just against having one for the sake of appearance. Whether potentially misleading the buyers is a matter or not is a decision each merchant will have to come to individually

[Mister Denial]

Hi phrasespot, you're right, I also think that customers believe that no personal data is collected if using guest checkout, but if they thought a bit longer about it, they'd know it can not be the case, as companies have no choice but collect that data in order to fulfill the order. Added to that, EU laws force merchants to keep ALL business relevant data for ten full years, merchants have to be able to prove to whom they sold what at any given time. And I'd bet that in the US there are similar laws.

 

That's the reason we clearly state in our privacy statement that we will collect your personal data for the purpose of completing your order and for complying with laws, and we also explain that we otherwise keep them safe and secret and do not share with third parties.

 

Do customers bother to read privacy statements at all, I don't know. Is it misleading, maybe a bit, but I think no harm is done to the customer if the merchants handles privacy correctly.

 

But thinking how Amazon for example only uses customer accounts and no guest checkout (at least in my country), I think I am going to give it a try in the new shop I am working on.

[mlarino]

I also have problems with guest checkout, I dont like it at all, but my customers seem to like it.

Is there a way to move it to the right instead of to the left as it is now in Prestashop?

That way it will be a second option, not a first one.

[todaytonight]

The problem for guest checkout is not time saving issue but it actually creates invalid orders.

[Mister Denial]

And once customers have used guest checkout, they can never ever register that email again, unless they have you manually upgrade for them. That's not a good solution.

[Brighteyes]

Many customers want guest checkout. From experience I know that sales drop if there's no option.

[Mister Denial]

According to this article, it could be nearly 25% cart abandonment. http://econsultancy.com/lu/blog/10355-eight-out-of-top-10-us-retailers-offer-guest-checkout

 

But the thing is, Prestashop does not offer a good conversion option for guest customers to a registered account. They can't upgrade later, they have to contact the shop admin to manually upgrade.

 

That would be a nice feature to have in the future. Improved guest checkout / upgrade options.

[Brighteyes]

Yeah, that definitely needs sorting...c'mon Prestashop!

[LowCarbCentral]

TLDR: everything above is true, but guest checkouts = 20% or so increase in sales.  Read the famous http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/ to know why.

 

 

I normally don't resurrect ancient topics, but I'm looking for something fairly specific and this ranked highly... so I figure I should put forward an alternate viewpoint.

 

Pretty much everything above is true - guest checkouts ARE NOT good. They do NOT save time (excepting the entry of a password, twice).  They ruin data integrity, create duplicate entities and do all sorts of "bad things" to your database.

 

No argument. Here is the other side of the coin:

 

1. From memory when I did the research on this, making "guest checkout" available  increased sales by 15-25%.  That's right - enabling this piece of evil bumps sales by a full quarter or thereabouts.
   1. when implemented on one of my stores, the increase in sales, adjusted for growth was 20-22%
   2. guest checkouts are painful to support/manage and there's just no way to make them NOT suck
   3. it doesn't have to be "a guest checkout" - it has to be "you can buy stuff without having to 'sign up' with us"
      ​
2. Visitors "want what they want" from a website.  They don't know (or care) if it is logical, sane, acceptable technical practice etc.  They just want stuff.
    
3. Visitor resistance to registration has nothing to do with time saving, good data integrity or anything else - guest checkout is a 100% psychological winner.
   1. Most visitors are very suspicious (paranoid) that every request "to register" is really a sinister plot to get their super secret details and spam them and market to them.
   2. Most visitors have no idea that the only extra bit of info they would supply is a password, which cannot be read by the store owner anyway.
   3. No one wants to try and remember "another set of details", but there are also many many stores where they will not use social sign on either.
   4. They don't want a relationship - they want to buy your stuff and leave as quickly as possible - you smell bad.

I hated guest checkout - for all the reasons here.  I still do.  What's wrong with creating an account? Jeeees.

 

Recently though, I understand.  I don't agree with it, but I understand it.  They're scared, not good with computers, used to screwing up logins, apprehensive and top of it all - paranoid that they are giving up their privacy - to someone they don't know and do not want to know.  Never mind what they post on Facebook or Twitter - your little store is a BIG concern.

 

I'm not saying YES or NO to guest checkout - what I am saying is that this whole thread is true, but only half the story.  The  other half of the story is best read here:

 

http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/

 

Yep,  a $300,000,000 button because people just don't like registration.  And it's not at all logical.

Edited June 16, 2015 by LowCarbCentral (see edit history)

[Lerpsu]

Any updates regarding this issue?

We've been running PrestaShop store since summer 2012 and this is real pain in the ass. If customer has registered an account but don't remember his/her password OR wants to use guest checkout it's impossible. They get an ugly error which causes cart abandonment. Also if a customer has used GC earlier but would like to create a new account it's impossible too.

 

We can't even know customer's email in that case because PrestaShop rejects saving. If we were able to get that information then we would be able to send customer cart abandonment reminder.

 

The problem is that we have had GC enabled for years now. Many customers have registered an account in store while there are plenty of users who have used GC. This is really a big problem (and getting bigger and bigger) for us as we are losing sales with this issue.

[Gomlers]

@Lerpsu - you could maybe benefit from a One Page Checkout module that makes it possible for registered users to checkout as guest.

Check canin.sk or Knowband's Supercheckout- they should help you fix the issues you are facing.

And this module may also solve the issue with all the different accounts: 

https://addons.prestashop.com/en/customer-administration/23412-combine-guests.html

(I have never had a live shop with any of these modules, so this was only a suggestion, and I am not a coder - it was just meant as a tip  )