Forced Signups vs. Allowing Customers to Purchase in Guest Mode

When we talk about user experience, it goes beyond the commonly understood norms of having good experience on a website. User experience is all about how the visitors feel on your website till the completion of their tasks. So, it matters how smooth navigation is and how quickly you can find information about the products you're going to buy without being redirected or clicking deeper links. 

What is User Experience

User experience is not just about smooth navigation. It's the overall experience that we offer to a visitor or customer. So from searching, filtering and selecting the right product to checkout -- everything should be smooth and quick. User interface should be intuitive.

Don’t Create Barriers in The Way of Conversion 

While doing this you need to keep all of the customer types in mind. There are a few customers, who do not want to sign up for your website while purchasing a product. If you have a policy of creating barriers such as mandatory signup or sign in, you may lose a great chunk of sales. According to surveys, there are a lot of customers who do not want to sign in or sign up for a website before they buy a product online. 

Allow Your Customers to Buy in Guest Mode

People resist signing up for various reasons. They may not want to be bothered about their email inbox getting spammed or mobile messages flooding in. Many a times, customers do not wish to signup because they may not intend to buy from you in future. They would also want to test the quality and service you offer while buying in guest mode.

The only way to persuade such customers to signup is offering them good experience. We understand that you need to harvest important data about your customers, but that shouldn't be done at the cost of annoyance of your customer. If they want to buy something anonymously, let them do it. Harvesting email addresses and other credentials is important but not always necessary. 

You must arrange for guest checkout as an option. Allowing your customers to buy in guest mode is always a good idea. It speaks well about your user experience and people love to buy from such sites. It doesn't mean that harvesting data is a bad idea; it only means that user experience should not be compromised at the cost of any such step. User experience should be on top and at the core of everything from searching the products to navigation to check out. 

Final Words

Forced signups sometimes hinder conversions. The same is true for a payment gateway integrated with your website. There shouldn't be any transaction failure from payment gateway. A transaction failure is always extremely annoying and not good for user experience. Choose an online payment gateway India that has a very low transaction failure rate. It should be supported by good technology.