E-Commerce Registration

We've noticed that many E-Commerce sites are beautifully designed up until you add the product to your cart. Once its in the cart the user experience becomes disjointed and unfamiliar. Many times this is due to pre-built systems that companies are cramming their websites into. Other times its just a lack of thought and planning. In either case, we are committed to changing that and have come up with at least one rather unique idea in simplifying this process.

The first step in many checkout processes is to register a new account or signin as an existing user. It has been proven that this "registration" step causes the highest abandonment rates. The sites with the user more in mind allow for a "checkout as guest", but typically users feel like they are missing out if they proceed this way. The other issue with requiring user accounts for checkout is the inevitable issues of forgeting usernames and passwords. We all have dozens of user accounts and its tough to keep them straight. Then when forgetting a password typically users have to go through a cumbersome reset process. 

Considering these frustrations, we've developed a system that creates user accounts without adding to the inconvenience of the checkout process. When the users add to cart on sites we develop they can go directly to checkout. In that first step they enter their shipping information and email address. All users are created an account with this information. No password required. No extra registration step. Once the users complete the process they are sent an email with a specially encoded URL specifically to access their account information. They can always use that URL to access their account and can request it be resent if lost.

While this doesn't provide the highest level of security, most e-commerce sites don't store credit card or other extremely sensitive data and this allows a method that is still a very good security deterant.

We will continue to ask questions about e-commerce norms and would love to hear more about how you are pushing the web envelope.