Customer registration - is it mandatory?

[SoapyHollow]

Hiya, I'm still evaluating which shopping cart to use. OsCommerce certainly seems to be the most robust, as far as modules and things go, but one thing concerns me. On every live site and demo site I've seen, customer registration at checkout seems mandatory.

 

In a survey that I did, about 25% of the people surveyed said that mandatory registrations to buy something annoyed them enough that they might consider abandoning the cart. I generally avoid brick and mortar retailers that demand information in order to take my money, and I'm not sure that I want to force customers to remember a password just to give me money. :)

 

Can that option be disabled? Is there some business logic that I'm overlooking that would make this a good enough business practice to take the chance of losing a quarter of potential customers?

 

Thanks!

[cwc2]

Hiya, I'm still evaluating which shopping cart to use. OsCommerce certainly seems to be the most robust, as far as modules and things go, but one thing concerns me. On every live site and demo site I've seen, customer registration at checkout seems mandatory.

 

In a survey that I did, about 25% of the people surveyed said that mandatory registrations to buy something annoyed them enough that they might consider abandoning the cart. I generally avoid brick and mortar retailers that demand information in order to take my money, and I'm not sure that I want to force customers to remember a password just to give me money. :)

 

Can that option be disabled? Is there some business logic that I'm overlooking that would make this a good enough business practice to take the chance of losing a quarter of potential customers?

 

Thanks!

 

I fully agree with you. The mandatory registration needs to be optional.

[♥toyicebear]

Look at Purchase without account ( PWA ) or Fast Esay Checkout ( FEC ) in the contributions section..