I’m building out an e-commerce frontend for the ERP my company uses, and I am being slightly lazy while working on the shopping cart to start. I’ve noticed in many other stores guest carts, or not having to be logged in to purchase. How necessary is it to have guest shopping?
Lol if I have to sign up first, I’d leave and go somewhere else.
I want to see the full shipping and delivery price before I commit to anything, even signing up.
I do not have a lot of experience with commerce but you’re supposed to optimize the customer experience. If the customer needs an account to add something to the cart, he might abandon his purchase during the account creation process.
Only some percentage of all potential users will abandon the purchase due to something like this, but your goal is to reduce this percentage as much as possible.
That’s why analytics are used to understand which environment leads to the most purchases and prevent users from abandoning the process.
This seems more like a business analytics kind of question than a programming question. But I’d imagine you’ll get less sales without a guest checkout option than with if that answers your question.
You might manage to mitigate that a bit by letting folks fill their cart and start the checkout process and only require them to sign in at the last minute after they’re already pretty invested in checking out.
as always, the answer is it depends. I’ve worked on B2B websites where you can’t even see the real pricing until you sign in so it is impossible for that application to add a guest checkout. it really depends on your requirements.
