When you buying a product in a local store, cashiers often ask you some questions like: “Do you want to sign up for our membership card?” or “What’s your email address/your telephone number?” Maybe it’s just a standard company policy but sometimes it will make you feel frustrated because you just want to quickly buy the product and go on your way.

In another sector, this situation also often occurs when you shopping online. When you decide to buy a product from an ecommerce store, you quickly choose the product then click on checkout button. The bad situation is you just want to buy product quickly as possible but they requires you to sign up before continue checkout. So, this can lead to a huge number of potential customers will abandon their carts and buy the item they need in another store, where allow guest checkout.

What makes a customer not want to sign up?

When the customers are in a rush, it’s a bad idea if you require them to create an accounts right in the first step of checkout process. Offer customer to create account is good, but you need to do that in a reasonable manner. If you want to completely remove the ‘sign up’ barrier, a valuable advice for you is allow customer can checkout as guest and ask them to sign up at the end of the transaction. This option will make checkout process more streamlined because at the end of checkout, customer’s contact and billing information was entered and customer just need to add password or little more necessary info to create an account.

When receive the offer to create new account, customers often concerned that they will also be added to newsletters and spam and they believe they’ll get bombarded with unwanted emails. So, make it clear to customers, providing checkbox which allows them to choose that they want to get newsletter email and promotions or not.

In addition, the worry about security is one of the biggest concerns that make customers aren’t comfortable to creating accounts for every store they buy from. If they do shopping online a lot, they are likely already have multiple accounts created within different stores and they may not want to shed out all of their information at once due to security precautions. So, not a good idea if you force your customers to have account, there should be a more subtle approach. Consider to make the guest checkout option to be more prominent than the option to create an account, or maybe eliminated altogether.



Allowing guest checkout for higher conversion rates

If you are ecommerce store owner, a highlight note for you that if you are not enabling guest checkout, you are likely have to see the conversion rates drop and the cart abandonment rate will go up. This is one of the biggest dropping points for customers and you must know that over 30% of customers leave because they are forced to create an account.

Instead of forcing customer create account; try to eliminate the “Sign up” barrier by removing “Sign in to checkout”. Or if you want customers to sign up, offer them at the very end of their transaction, when their personal informations have been added during checkout process. Let’s do it in a subtle way as possible.

If you want to enable guest checkout on your Virtuemart store, one page checkout extension will help you. You can easily to turn on guest checkout option and open-up the chance to increase revenue up to 70%…