Best Practice: Creating an account during the shopping-cart process

Question

What is better in e-shop shopping-cart? 1) Automatically create accounts together with the purchase (automatically generated password is sent to the e-mail).

or

2) Let the user the optional ability(the user clicks the checkbox that wants Account) to create their own account with theirs own password? In the case of custom password users fills only two extra (password) fields.

Optional ability means fewer accounts for us, but we have a better chance that people will remember that there have account and password to it.

3) Or you can invent something better?

We want most logged customers in the eshop.

Edit: Automatically created an account in my case means that the user did not fill even one extra fields in the ordering process. The account is created with the order as a secondary thing. Thus the user is not forced to do any extra action.

Answer 1

Absolutely do not send the user's password in a plain text email. It's in the top 10 of all-time security fails.

This is one of few UX issues that has to take into account the constraints of the current technology environment. I have worked with some systems that demanded an account be created in order to even put items in a shopping cart.

Assuming you're not held back I would recommend the following:

1. At the beginning of the checkout process, provide the user with a screen that has three elements - a login/password form, a button to create an account, and a button to checkout as a guest.

2. If guest is selected, allow the user to proceed through the checkout process without forcing account creation. Warn the user in the event they provide an email address for the order that is already associated with an account (and ask them to login).

3. In the final step ask the user to define a password so they may shop again more easily. If they do, all is well and you can move on.

Assuming they do not create an account:

4. Store the incomplete user record in a manner where it can be distinguished from other accounts. An easy choice is to leave a blank password. Users with blank passwords = users without full-fledged accounts.

5. The user needs the ability to check on their order - so you need a mechanism where this can take place without credentials. It's common to use order number and zip code as a means of verifying identity.

The final thing to take care of is that the user may choose to create an account in the future. They may try to login thinking they have an account or they may go through the process to create the account:

6. Attempts to login with an account without a password should take the user through the process of claiming their account. A verification email should be sent to the address with a link. Following the link verifies the user's identity and allows the user to set a password.

7. Attempts to create the account from scratch should look just like the regular creation process - just make sure you don't shift the user's status from partial to full before they click the verification link.

This could be a lot of legwork for your engineers if they are not setup to handle such flows. A few final notes:

• The account recovery piece is more important in scenarios where you do not want the user's purchase history fragmented across accounts. If they used an email address as a guest and later created an account using the same address, the purchase made as a guest should be viewable.

• Strive to make sure that the user does not feel any of the behind the scenes juggling to make this work. Make it look like the mainstream process.

• Take advantage of the fact that this is a question that can be definitively answered with experimentation and usage data. Define a funnel through the checkout process and look at the drop off at each step.

A few relevant links:

• Be our guest: a guide to ecommerce guest checkout best practice

• 11 of the world's best ecommerce checkouts

• Eight out of top 10 US retailers offer guest checkout

Answer 2

You should only create an account when it's strictly necessary and then only if the user wants to make an account.

If possible you should allow users to complete a transaction as a "guest" whereby they enter all their details but these are only stored with the current order and not used to create an account. You can suggest to the user that they create an account (as they'll be able to track the order etc.) but that's all.

If your system can't do this, then you should only create the account immediately before the checkout process and thus allow the user to abort the transaction if they don't want to create the account. If they do create an account to complete the purchase, you shouldn't autogenerate a password as you will have to mail this to the user in plaintext which is poor practice.

Creating accounts too early - for example to just be able to browse the site - is a major turn off for users.

If you want customers to create accounts you should be offering other incentives to them; special offers, mailing lists, early access to sales etc.

Answer 3

I understand that you need most logged customers. However, as @ChrisF said, it's not a good practice to force registration. As pointed out in the recent NNG article, if you need the user to register, highlight the benefits of registration from the users’ perspective and not the company’s perspective when asking users to register.

NNG had also done a e-commerce research and they found out that forced registrations results in lost sales. To quote from the article:

In our e-commerce research, we saw users who had previously complained about forced registration happily register for sites where registration was limited to the option of creating a password in the purchase process.

Forcing registration causes lost sales. Some users will leave the site, others will struggle with registration. It is common for sites that add guest checkout to immediately realize increased sales. It is a simple way to improve usability and encourage purchasing.

Edit: I would also not suggest automatic account creation. I've seen some sites do this and from what I've observed, users don't even remember that in their next visit. When users love your product, they commit to it by registering. Any forced commitment (manual or automatic) is not going to help the product.

Answer 4

It's great to create an account together with the purchase. But instead of sending an automatically generated password sending a link asking the user to create a new password would be appropriate. You can also provide a link to discard the account if they don't want to have an account. If it's an automatically generated password some may use it for the very first time to log in and forgot it later. If they again want to login later, then they should go back searching for the password which is in their mail. Instead if there is a link asking the user to choose a password they will use a password that they can easily keep track of.