Guest Checkout

Guest checkout lets someone buy from you without making an account, so they type a name, an address and an email or phone number, pay, and are finished. There is no password to invent, no confirmation email to hunt for and no new login to forget a month later.

Forcing people to register loses sales, and it loses them at the worst possible moment, because the customer has already chosen the product and already decided to spend the money. Then a form asks them to invent a password and agree to something, and some of them simply leave. A shop that only sees an abandoned basket rarely finds out why. So ask a friend who has never used your site to buy one item on their phone, and watch their face when that screen appears. Linkysoft starts most shop rebuilds with exactly that test, because it settles the argument in two minutes.

The fear behind a forced account is losing the buyer's details, and that fear is misplaced. A guest order still saves everything you actually need, because you cannot deliver anything without a name, an address and a way to reach the person. The order sits in your system with its own number, exactly like any other, and the only thing missing is a password.

The clean way to run it is to offer the account after the money rather than before. The receipt page confirms the order first, then invites the customer to set a password and keep the address for next time. Many people say yes at that point, because the account is finally worth something to them. When the same email address comes back months later, a well built shop quietly links the new order to the old ones. In Storek that history sits under the email address, whether the buyer ever set a password or not.

Two warnings before you switch it on. Guest details are still personal data, so the rules on consent, storage and deletion apply exactly as they did before. A guest who wants to check an order also needs a way in, which is normally a link in the email rather than a login screen. Linkysoft treats this as a website design question first and a web application question second, because the number of fields on that one page moves the sales figure more than almost anything else on the site.