Forcing people to register before purchase can be a barrier to conversion, so many ecommerce sites offer a guest checkout option.
This has been the general trend from retailers, so it’s a surprise to see ASOS moving away from this.
So, is this a good idea?
Lace up your sneakers, put your sweat bands through the washing machine, make a pitiful attempt at a couple of lunges and let’s go for a run.
Don’t worry, I’ll catch you up later. I just have some work to finish around… this… uh… hot-dog.
Nike is the world’s most valuable sports brand according to Forbes. It has a market value of $71bn, $19bn of which is estimated to be pure brand value. Nike also commands 62% of the US athletic footwear market.
Impressive stuff, but what of its nearest sporting rival Adidas? Has it been left puffing and wheezing, meters behind its striding opponent as it desperately rummages around its kit bag looking for an inhaler?
Ongoing profit from a customer’s lifetime value is generally much higher than any one single transaction.
However in order to achieve higher customer lifetime values (CLV) you need to have some strong customer retention strategies.
If you do this, you’ll also find that it’s much cheaper to retain a loyal customer than it is to constantly acquire new ones. 82% of companies asked in our Cross Channel Marketing report agree that customer retention is cheaper than acquisition.
Customer retention is a must for any business where its goals are for long-term success. Here are some of the ways that you can achieve this.
Forcing users to register their details before they checkout is one of the quickest ways to lower your conversion rate.
Once a customer is ready to buy something from your store, presenting them with page after page of forms in which they need to fill out the most unnecessary of personal details is a sure fire way to litter your site with abandoned baskets and disgruntled customers.
That’s why guest checkout is a must-have feature for almost every online retail experience.
As I mentioned in my best practice guide to guest checkouts having a guest checkout doesn’t necessarily mean losing out on valuable customer data, it means adopting practices that put the customer experience first.
Using guest checkout as the default option, then offering to ‘save the customer details’ after purchase can help lower cart abandonment.
Saving customer details implies convenience, it puts customer experience as the primary focus. ‘Registering’ implies future marketing spam.
Also, if your site automatically fills in any details that the customer has already given you, such as name, address and email, all your customer needs to do is choose a password.
Boom! Conversion achieved. Customer satisfaction achieved. Data achieved. Easy.
Welcome to this guide to gues… Oh wait hang on… You haven’t entered your email address….
Done? Great, now we can carry on. Welcome to this guide to guest checkouts, where we’ll take a look at best pract… hang on, your password isn’t valid, please try again.
Okay, great, let’s carry on… Hang on, have you already registered that email with us before? I’m sorry you can’t use that address if you’ve already registered it.
Guest checkouts! I love them. If it was at all possible I would carry out every transaction super quickly and utterly anonymously.
Last week our esteemed editor Graham Charlton compiled a list of the 11 best ecommerce checkouts in the world and in doing so came up with seven key features he felt were common to good practice.
These include speed, no forced registration and easy form filling. As far as I’m concerned having a guest checkout can cover all these things and more.
However, am I wrong about the glory of guest checkouts? Are there any drawbacks I’m not thinking of? Are there any best practice tips that can help ecommerce websites improve their guest checkouts?
Lets take a look. Wait, hang on, before we go any further, can you just enter your delivery address please…
Your customer has added items to their basket, clicked to proceed to checkout, so what should they see on the next page?
Well, since registration has been shown to be a barrier to conversion, they should see a page that takes an email address and eases them into the checkout proper.
But are sites doing this? Here are a few examples from ecommerce sites…
As less forward-thinking retailers have gone under in the past couple of weeks, John Lewis has been a high street success story, thanks in no small part to its multichannel approach.
The retaier achieved a 44% increase in online sales over Christmas, so what lessons are there for other retailers?
I’ve been asking John Lewis’ Head of Online Delivery and Customer Experience Sean O’Connor abut the secrets behind its success…
It proved to be a fruitful Christmas for John Lewis, with like-for-like sales up 13% in the five weeks to December 29 compared to the same period in 2011.
And the news from its ecommerce store was even more impressive. Online sales grew almost three-times faster at 44.3% and now account for a quarter of all group sales.
In fact it reached more than £800m in annual sales through Johnlewis.com in December.
So how has John Lewis managed to pull off such a massive increase in online sales? Here’s a run down of some of the reasons behind its continued success…
Forcing users to register their details before they checkout is a proven way of reducing your conversion rate.
Once a customer has chosen what they want to buy, they don’t want to have to fill in loads of forms and create an account before they can make a purchase.
ASOS managed to halve its abandonment rate at the registration page simply by removing any mention of creating an account, and another retailer added $300m to its annual revenues by removing the registration button.
But despite the evidence in favour of guest checkouts, many retailers (such as HMV) still force customers to create an account.
With this in mind, I looked at which of the top 10 US retailers still require users to register before checkout…