Every so often I’ll see a Tweet or similar along the lines of this:
If any e-commerce site forces me to register, I automatically go somewhere else! Yeah!
When I read this kind of thing, my first thought is “Man, it must really suck not being able to purchase on Amazon”. Then I sit back and envisage this poor soul sat at a desk, looking forlornly at an absolute auction bargain on eBay as the timer ticks down, knowing that they and the item in question can never be joined in a perfect union. And why not? Simply because eBay have the incredible audacity to make you register if you want to bid on an auction lot. What a poor soul indeed. In fact, come to think of it, how did this person even manage to register on Twitter to post a tweet?
Now, whilst there are clearly people who hold this view in the world (just like there are people who walk around with aluminium tin foil on their heads to prevent government mind control), it’s difficult to overlook the fact that Amazon and many other e-commerce sites who force registration still manage to make a shit load of money. If you’ve read as many identical CRO blog posts as I have, you might well think that all these e-commerce sites are working hard to offer a guest checkout option. This is not the case. In fact, many major sites are actually moving from optional registration to forced.
I should say before getting into the meat of this that it’s not escaped my attention that this post may portray me as a pro-registration fanatic; I’m not. You’re better placed than me to decide what’s right for your particular e-commerce website visitors and if 17 checkout paths including a guest checkout option works for you, then great. But whilst there are multitudinous blog posts stating how horribly bad asking your poor users to register is, I’ve seen very few explaining why so many sites choose to do this. I felt I could offer a little bit of much needed balance on the subject.
The house is taking a lot of time at the moment. We moved in January to our new house in Cheshire (I’d lived in Manchester city centre for about 5 years previously). At the time it seemed a good idea to buy something we could add value to. So far we’ve had the whole house rewired, then all re-plastered and then complete replacement of the central heating. Now I’m spending my days painting and laying floors which is more knackering than I realised! On the plus side, I have been able to formulate some good DIY to SEO analogies in my head, so maybe they’ll get turned into blog posts at some point 