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Don't force users to register before they can buy (2015)
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoYes. Buying things online has made me realize why friction is so bad. If someone wants to buy, don't waste their time. Let them give you money.
- waynesonfire 4y agoThere was a recent hackernews[1] post that talked about how great McMaster is. It seems that for consumer retail businesses, a purchase is just one of many many ways the business wants to suck more value out of you. Upselling and giving the marketing team something to do are a priority. It's gross. The dark patterns have been designed and A-B tested. They must have shown to increase in shareholder value, unfortunately, likely in the short term. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoSometime the increase is imaginary, driven by the "good" parts being easily measurable while the "bad" parts (loss of trust, abandoned carts) are not measurable, harder to measure and/or not being measured.
- silisili 4y agoIt's gross and comes off as desperate, to me at least. I'm far less likely to do business with a company who dicks around than straightforward ones. For example, I was working on my furnace this weekend and needed a part. Found on supplyhouse.com. No fuckery involved, I paid them asking price and they sent me the part. Why can't all transactions be so simple? Why does every site need a popover, multiple coupons, cookie warnings, privacy policies, etc? Maybe I'm just out of touch, but this all drives me -away-. I just want to pay money for X, receive X, and be done. If you make that hard, I'll look elsewhere.
- thecodemonkey 4y agoWhile not strictly e-commerce. This was an important design choice when we designed our spreadsheet upload tool for Geocodio. It should be possible to go through as much of the process as possible without having to sign up first. It certainly makes it technically more difficult to develop, but it's incredibly powerful and user friendly.
- gnicholas 4y agoWe’ve done the same thing with our Chrome extension. Someone can access our 2 week free trial without so much as entering an email address. We do this partly so it can be easily tried out by young students, partly because it makes things nicer for all users, and partly because it reduces customer support and refund requests. The downside is that we can’t put folks in an e-mail drip campaign, which would help us educate our users and increase our conversion rate. But we hate spam, so we don’t view not-spamming as much of a downside.
- nottorp 4y agoI'm pretty sure there was one product i abandoned in spite of it being somewhat useful - all because they started to send me tips and tricks emails after i signed up.
- tracker1 4y agoI can't tell you how many times I've done a guest checkout, then come back to register and my order doesn't show up in the history, even if the email matches. Now I make sure to try to register first as it's such a broken experience in too many places if you don't.
- dukoid 4y agoSamsung in particular advertises account registration after guest checkout with "register to track your order" -- and then it doesn't work.
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoOne of the dumbest anti-patterns. Even major shopping cart frameworks have this problem such as spree and activemerchant. The one who gets this mostly right is Shopify. They're the "Stripe" of shopping carts.
- gboss 4y agoIt's generally not done because it's a security issue as an attacker could register before you with your email and gain access to your personal info (billing and shipping address and maybe last four of credit card). What would be best if the eCommerce site would send you an email to confirm your email address to unlock your guest checkout orders. That's a fairly complicated flow for most eCommerce outfits so I think they just default to not show guest orders.
- tracker1 4y agoAnd when I click the "track your package" in the email confirmation, which guides me into "create an account" but still doesn't show?
- makeitdouble 4y agoI get the frustration and why it should work better. But then, why still use guest checkout ? I totally stopped and will register an account wherever I give my credit card. The difference with guest checkout is usually infinitesimal and I actually want to keep somewhere (in my password vault in this case) the places that have my full info and where to contact them.
- gnicholas 4y agoI find it especially creepy when I start checking out as a guest, decide not to proceed (often due to usurious “shipping and handling” charges), and then get an email about my abandoned cart. I get why companies do this, but IMO if I enter my email address and have not given permission for it to be used except for a given transaction, then it shouldn’t be used at all if the transaction isn’t ratified. It’s one step removed from tracking character input in a text box and capturing an email address that was subsequently deleted prior to submitting a form.
- philote 4y agoIf you think that's bad, I worked at a company that didn't always need your email address. Their customer sites would add their third-party cookie, so if you enter your email on any of their customer sites they could send you a cart abandonment email (I don't think you even had to SUBMIT your email, as it would be sent to the server as soon as it looked like a valid email). Fortunately I quit working for them once they started going down that evil route.
- lmm 4y agoIf you're in the EU, GDPR provides you with a mechanism to go after companies that do this, although the details for how you do that will be country-specific.
- solarkraft 4y agoIt may even be illegal.
- EvanAnderson 4y agoI tend to abandon prospective purchases if I'm forced to make an account. If it's something I really need and can't get anywhere else (and if I don't intend to have a protracted business relationship with the seller) I usually sign up with snarky addresses (that I still receive) like: SellerDomain-I-hate-that-you-make-me-register@mydomain.com Not only can I easily squelch all future email from the seller but there's at least a remote chance somebody will recognize my ire and think about their process.
- switchbak 4y agoI too will abandon a purchasing quest if they force that crap on me. Doubly so for all those small time sites that make me then log in or add something to my cart just to see a price. I don't understand how this behaviour can persist when it's customer repellant. (Unless they're optimizing for a different captive market, and really aren't interested in my business).
- nsxwolf 4y agoSometimes the "add to cart to see price" means you're getting a good price - the manufacturer set a minimum price and they're going below, and they don't want it to show up in searches.
- crooked-v 4y agoThat's also why the Costco website has lots of "sign in to see the price" pages.
- entropicdrifter 4y agoI mean, Costco is already members-only anyhow
- sib 4y ago(At least historically) not for everything online...
- Ensorceled 4y agoOn the flip side, people literally go through these kinds of expedited transaction processes and use my email address, so I get receipts, requests to create accounts, "review the product" emails, etc. Please validate emails OR let me click on a "that wasn't me" link. If not, I will flag your email, and company, as spam.
- RockRobotRock 4y agoWhy do people use your email address?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Ensorceled 4y agoThere are more than 1600 people with my first and last name in North America and the UK and I have first.last@gmail.com. So, when the give a fake email… it’s mine.
- alias_neo 4y agoI went into a sofa store in the UK a few years ago and gave them some details like my email address for a potential purchase which they input into a tablet. Some time later, I started receiving emails about my sofa purchase, addressed nice and personally to "Paul" (not my name) and then some time after that, emails about my "finance agreement". It was all legit, except for the fact that none of it was intended for me. Someone had been in to the store after me, and somehow they'd entered my email address on this guys form, he's never had any of his documents about his finance agreement, or when his sofa was going to be delivered, etc, because I had it all. Hope the guy got his sofa in the end, but company made it almost impossible for me to tell them they were sending all this stuff to the wrong email, in the end I just blocked them.
- suprjami 4y agoI am aware of 4 other people who share my name, one of them has an email address one character off from mine. I've followed their life from their employment offer, maternity leave plans, childbirth hospital trip, baby photos, pet purchases, school registration, and recently their child is registered in a gifted student program. I'm almost part of the family!
- zouhair 4y agoI stopped counting the times I abandoned a purchase for this same reason.
- BrianHenryIE 4y agoA related bad UX is forcing users who do have accounts to log in to complete their purchase. I wrote a couple of WordPress/WooCommerce plugins to smooth this out – by prompting for login if an account exists matching the email address, and by adding single use passwords to emails sent from the site, so users who visit the site are already logged in when they arrive: * https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/bh-wp-account-and-login-ux https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/bh-wp-account-and-login-ux * https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/bh-wp-autologin-urls https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/bh-wp-autologin-urls
- Spooky23 4y agoA friend consulted at a DMV years ago and improved their online transaction conversions a lot by dropping the login requirement for things like registrations. Nobody wakes up and decides to pay someone else’s car tax. And if they do, if the money is good, who cares? The other thing is the need for an account at all. With a lot of online merchants, I don’t want an ongoing relationship. Take your cash and leave me alone.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago> Nobody wakes up and decides to pay someone else’s car tax. Or they do, because they woke up to a car from a parent who isn't doing this newfangled internet thing but would like the car tax paid.
- dghlsakjg 4y agoI used to work as a teller at a bank, and people would be really mystified when I wouldn't id them for deposit transactions. The rules might have changed now, but at the time anyone could put a deposit into any account they knew the number for. That's how after hours business deposit boxes work, after all. Some people would be genuinely upset, until I pointed out that the transaction receipt only showed that a deposit had been made, and that I wasn't revealing anything that the depositor didn't already know. There was no known threat vector that we could figure.
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoAnything in the way is a conversion fail and leaving money on the table. And for heck's sake, automatically associate previous guest transactions with a new account when a user finally decides to take the plunge.
- suprjami 4y agoThe 2022 version is not to nag users with a registration flyover for your blog post, the instant the user visits and hasn't even read the first sentence. I won't visit Medium or Substack blogs at all because of this awful pattern.
- cyberphobe 4y agoI used to refuse to use those services, but then I got libredirect [1] which does a great job of decrapifying them and a lot of other anti-user websites. [1] https://libredirect.codeberg.page https://libredirect.codeberg.page EDIT: I will still attempt to avoid your shitty substack/medium blog if literally any other sources are available. Please stop using this garbage.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- agluszak 4y agoLibRedirect[1] makes these blogs (and other parts of internet) more bearable. [1] https://libredirect.github.io/ https://libredirect.github.io/
- solarkraft 4y agoI liken it to somebody coming up to you to talk and immediately slapping you in the face as the first action.
- pwg 4y agoAnd my related pet-peeve, entry of credit card number comes before display of shipping and handling charges for the order. I've abandoned carts at sites that did not provide S/H before they wanted my credit card number.
- crazygringo 4y agoWow, I feel like I buy a lot of stuff online but I don't think I've ever come across that. It sounds super bad. Is there a particular site or commerce platform that is known for implementing this?
- RajT88 4y agoThose drop-shipper websites which are extremely numerous (and often haven't been running for very long) are quite guilty of this. They sometimes use this as a way of "bait and switch" - we're sorry, we're out of stock, but if you want to use the credit for this item on other things...
- jhallenworld 4y agoI'll add to that: always tell customer up front if there is stock or if back-ordered. Burned too many times by the silent back-order.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Spivak 4y agoIt in no way justifies it but this is usually because left hand doesn't know about the right something something good engineering. You have the site that's independently run and exists as nothing but a client to the other system that handles inventory and fulfillment blah blah business! And that system isn't made in-house so you're at the whim of whatever order submission "thing" (because it's not always an API, the horror) it exposes to you and sadly a lot of them the only way to see if you can actually complete a purchase is to try and see if it errs.
- 4y ago
- fendy3002 4y agoFrom design standpoint, how do we design for user-related interactions though, like tracking /reviewing the purchase, informing when some error / failure happen in the middle, purchase receipt etc?
- bell-cot 4y agoThank you for your order, Guest! Your Order Number is 123456789 Your Order PIN is 12345 With your Order Number and Order PIN, you can review or track your order >HERE<. Please note that we have no way to reach you if any problem occurs with your order, unless you review your order. Click >HERE< for a printable receipt. (It will NOT show your PIN.)
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoThe user probably provided an e-mail address. Tracking link goes there.
- scoofy 4y agoAs someone who started a wiki... yea... people really don't want to make accounts. The second I started letting people just edit things without being logged in, the wiki immediately became dramatically more useful to everyone. I was worried about vandalism, but it's really not an issue exactly because nobody actually cares about the site at all. It's a golf wiki if anyone is curious: https://golfcourse.wiki https://golfcourse.wiki
- willchis 4y agoThis is cool! Just added my local course.
- scoofy 4y agoThanks! But I think the relevant info is: did you make an account? ha!
- solarkraft 4y agoI guess this illuminates why Wikipedia still allows anonymous edits. It's something I would never have considered precisely because of vandalism, but I suppose the urge to add information is low enough for most people that any distraction will lead them to not go through.
- nonameiguess 4y agoI've made two edits to Wikipedia ever. Once in college over 20 years ago in an article about Thomas Hobbes, and once a few months ago in an article about the Slayer album Reign in Blood. I quite appreciate that they did not try to make me create an account that I would use once every 20 years.
- scoofy 4y agoOn my site having an account unlocks a bunch of useful features. Mainly, a version control system. Anyone trying to vandalize will have a harder time doing it than a 1 click reset by a user. That’s how I ended up justifying it.
- MinaMe 4y ago[flagged]
- satvikpendem 4y agoI want to see the actual conversion statistics. Oftentimes these kinds of patterns emerge because they work, regardless of what people say.
- WalterBright 4y agoI'm happy that most utility companies don't force me to open an online account to pay. They have a "guest pay" feature. Much appreciated. I also hate websites where they hide your password while typing it in. Who can enter a password like Xaa3$#%^&*JqUIx correctly while blind? "Three attempts and your account is locked out!" AAAGGGHHHHH.
- ThunderSizzle 4y agoI grew into a habit of writing it to a notepad and copy/pasting if I needed to type a really complicated long password.
- hunter2_ 4y agoI use a bookmarklet to achieve this (a userscript that runs automatically could, too, I imagine). javascript:Array.prototype.slice.call(document.querySelectorAll(%27input%5Btype%3Dpassword%5D%27)).map(function(el)%7Bel.setAttribute(%27type%27,%27text%27)%7D)
- fsckboy 4y agooh my sweet summer child, in wintry implementations they don't allow pasting into a password field, and winter has arrived.
- pwg 4y ago> in wintry implementations they don't allow pasting into a password field With Firefox, setting the "dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled" about:config setting to false stops this dark pattern, allowing one to paste into fields that the website designer attempted to block one from pasting into.
- 3np 4y ago> I also hate websites where they hide your password while typing it in. ...You mean all of them? Including this one?
- 4y ago
- colpabar 4y agoDon't force me to do anything. Don't force me to make an account, don't force me to uncheck a box to say I don't want you to send me spam, don't tack on "extras" like a youtube subscription that I have to notice and unselect. Let me add stuff to a cart, and then let me pay for it. Don't even ask me to make an account on your site until I have fully completed my purchase, and don't try to trick me into thinking I need one. The thing about making an account that is so annoying is that I already need at least two accounts to buy something online, usually. I need some kind of account that lets me pay for things, like a credit card or paypal. I then also need an email account to check out, usually.
- znpy 4y agothe most annoying thing is "register to download our whitepaper". i usually enter the email address "marketing@<websitedomain>" so that they then spam themselves
- FridgeSeal 4y agoAnother fun thing to do - if they're using client-side validation, you can often just open up the html and delete the form fields, and the download link will often relent because there's no more required fields for you to provide.
- marcrosoft 4y agoOne reason to require an account or valid email is to slow down credit card test scammers.
- jmacd 4y agoI was involved in building a few decently large e-commerce sites in the early 2000s. One thing I always advocated and we did in a few places was to create an account for a user in every instance. If they ever came back to the login form, they would get a password reset email automatically. One thing that really surprised us: a significant number of return users clicked "forgot password?" before attempting signup. We deduced that they believed they had an account but couldn't remember the password (this was before password managers). When they'd did access their account, it had all their order history, email support history, etc all pre-populated. This approach did not require us to retain any additional data on top of what we would have retained with only keeping their unauthenticated (guest) checkout orders on file.
- jaclaz 4y agoAlso as a side note, let's talk of the (delivery) address. In the EU, it is very probable that if you are registering for buying something on a "national" site (as an example a .de or a .it, particularly when the site is also only in German or Italian) you want the stuff sent to a national address. The drop-down list almost invariably is alphabetically ordered, and contains all states in the world, i.e. it starts with Afghanistan, and often on mobile/touch these lists are not particularly easy to scroll. It is a little thing, but still putting a pre-selected default for the state where you send like 99.999% of orders might smooth a little the attrition.
- hgsgm 4y ago[dead]