Guest checkout is a preference your regular customers share, so build it as the main route
Guest checkout is usually treated as the route for strangers: the first-time visitor, the gift buyer, the shopper who will never return. Survey data from Capterra points somewhere else. Capterra asked 770 US consumers who shop online at least once a week how they prefer to check out, in March 2022. Guest checkout came first, preferred by 43%, ahead of social login (29%) and creating a new account (28%). The more telling figure sits underneath: 72% of those who prefer guest checkout said they would still use it at a company where they already have an account.
That changes what the guest route is. It is not a stage before registration that shoppers grow out of. For a large group it is simply how they like to buy, from shops they know as well as from shops they do not. A checkout that treats the guest form as a lesser path, with fewer conveniences and a nudge to register on every step, treats a share of its loyal customers the same way.
What guest shoppers say they are avoiding
The reasons Capterra recorded are practical. Among respondents who prefer guest checkout, 74% said it is faster than creating an account, 56% did not want another online account to manage, and 47% said it asks for less personal information. Speed, one less password and less data: none of these is solved by making the registration form shorter. They are solved by not asking.
The same survey shows how expensive the question can be. Of all respondents, 82% said they had abandoned a purchase at some point because account registration was too complicated, and 36% said they would abandon if forced to create a new account. Baymard Institute finds the same pattern in its own survey of US online shoppers, where 18% of those who abandoned an order, once shoppers who were only browsing are set aside, say the site wanted them to create an account. Time matters too: 66% of Capterra’s respondents expect to get through checkout in four minutes or less, and 28% in two minutes or less.
The Capterra data is more than four years old and comes from US shoppers, so treat the percentages as a direction rather than a benchmark for a Dutch shop. The direction has held: Baymard’s list, last updated in September 2025, still puts a required account among the main reasons shoppers give for leaving a checkout.
Recognition without an account is now on offer, and it raises its own questions
In August 2024 PayPal made Fastlane available to US businesses, a guest checkout that recognises a shopper by email address and sends a one-time code so the shopper can autofill the checkout. A guest who is not recognised can opt in to a profile during checkout, without a password. The conversion figures PayPal publishes for the product come from its own internal data. Whatever the numbers, the approach answers two of the three reasons guest shoppers give: no password and no typing. It does not answer the third. The shopper is asked to give personal data to a network in exchange for speed, and some guest shoppers chose guest checkout precisely to share less.
Recognition of this kind belongs in the checkout as an option the shopper can see and decline, not as a step in the way. A guest who does not want to be recognised should be able to continue typing without being sent through a verification screen first. Check also how a recognised shopper changes a prefilled address. A gift sent to someone else is exactly the order where the stored details are wrong.
Asking less is the part you control fully
Much of the speed guest shoppers want comes from fields you can drop. Baymard recommends using the shipping address as the billing address by default, with the billing fields hidden until the shopper indicates they differ, and found in January 2023 that 16% of mobile sites in its benchmark had severe problems with this. Testers who had to tick a box themselves, or clear prefilled billing fields one by one, lost time and made more mistakes, and the effect was worse on a phone.
The email field deserves a second look as well. In Capterra’s survey, 75% said they use a separate, throwaway email address for online shopping. For a guest order that address is the only contact you have, and it is where the order confirmation, the delivery updates and any message about a failed payment go. Say next to the field what the address is used for, so the shopper gives one they actually read.
Give the guest route the conveniences you reserve for accounts
List what a logged-in customer gets in your checkout that a guest does not: a saved address, a remembered payment method, order tracking, an easy return. Then decide for each item whether it really needs an account. Tracking and returns can work from the order number and email address. An address lookup from postcode and house number helps a guest as much as an account holder. Put guest checkout at the same level as logging in, label it plainly, and offer an account after the order is placed, not before. The shoppers who prefer the guest route will keep using it, and that is the route that should be fastest.
Sources: capterra.com, newsroom.paypal-corp.com, baymard.com, baymard.com
