Check out as a guest means customers can make purchases without logging or creating accounts. The brand does not keep any of customers’ information throughout the checkout process.

Therefore, returning shoppers will have to re-enter their information for subsequent purchases.

1. Why is Guest Checkout beneficial

Guess checkouts can increase customers’ satisfaction during their shopping experience. Account creation is a tedious, multi-step process. Therefore, customers can enjoy a simpler more pleasant shopping experience via guest checkouts. 

When checking out as a guest, customers can be worry-free about data breach. This is a common concern among e-commerce websites, especially those with forced account checkouts.

Cyber-terrorists steal information from customers’ accounts by infiltrating servers and databases. Checking out as a guest, however, provides shoppers with a greater sense of security since their information is not saved.

Guest checkouts may also lower your cart abandonment rate. Countless factors influence the purchase decision of shoppers, but one of the strongest ones is the checkout method. Baymard Institute has shown that over one-third of cart abandonment cases are attributed to forced account checkouts. 

With a lower shopping cart abandonment rate, you may get a higher conversion rate., Conversion rate, which reflects the percentage of shoppers that make a purchase after visiting your e-commerce website, is a critically important performance metric for sellers who own e-commerce websites.

2. Disadvantages of Guest Checkouts

Some shoppers, for example, prefer to make purchases while logged in to their account because their information will be saved for future use. If your website doesn’t offer account creation, you may notice fewer shoppers return to your shop.

If checked out as guests, shoppers may be struggling to track their order when they do not have their own account to store their purchase data.

Moreover, unlike customers who signed up for an account, it is often more tricky when it comes to supporting customers who chose the option to check out as a guest. If they checked out without an account, you would not have their information saved in an easily accessible database. Therefore, there are chances that you might have to look through all recent orders in your website in order to find that very one specific order they are inquiring about. 

Guest checkouts also do not allow you to use email for marketing purposes such as contacting your eCommerce website’s buyers. For email marketing, you need shoppers to confirm their subscription to your ecommerce website’s newsletter, which is easily achieved via account registration.