[Plugin: TheCartPress eCommerce Shopping Cart] Guest checkout enhancement – process redesign

Thanks for including Guest Checkout in Cartpress.

http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/
Jared M. Spool, Founder of User Interface Engineering:

It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year….

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. …

(first-time shoppers) did mind registering…As one shopper told us, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

However, the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired.

Ideally, there would be no register option. There would only be 2 blocks – login and checkout.

In the checkout process, at the very end, the guest shall have the option of providing a password (or if the shop admin hasn’t permitted guest checkout, then providing a password shall be required)…at this point benefits of providing a password to create an account shall be articulated:
e.g. Addresses saved (save time)
Loyalty programs (save money)
Carts saved (save time)
Order tracking (control and reliability)
etc

It may seem either
a. a tiny thing for me to crib about
b. too much work to re-do the checkout workflow

However, in the real world it has a big impact…when the customer is at the shop, all he wants to do is buy….if a new customer when trying to check out sees the register button, he is highly likely to abandon the cart. On the other hand, if at the end of the checkout process the customer is asked if he wants to create an account and the only difference is to either provide or not provide password, he is much more malleable and likely to sign up for an account.

Jared Spool agrees. Check out the $300M button article.
http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/
Jared M. Spool, Founder of User Interface Engineering:

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/thecartpress/