The best reason to create an account is the order the shopper just paid for
Once the payment has gone through, the shopper’s next question is simple: when will it arrive? Everything a webshop does after the order button either answers that question or gets in its way. That includes the account offer. Most sites treat registration as a request of their own, placed wherever it suits them and backed by a generic promise. It works better as the answer to what the shopper wants next, offered at the moment they want it.
After paying, the shopper wants to follow the order
Baymard Institute’s quantitative research puts order tracking at the top of what shoppers value in an account: half of the respondents in its study named it the most important account feature. That is the strongest reason anyone has to register, and many sites undermine it. In Baymard’s testing, 67% of sites did not consistently show all the key tracking details, and a quarter could not be relied on to give an expected delivery date.
When the information is missing, shoppers go looking for it on the carrier’s site. Baymard describes that as a loss of control over the order experience: the shopper leaves the shop and can end up on a page with no route back to the order. Whatever the carrier page does not answer then becomes a question for your customer service. The carrier name alone is useful, because it tells the shopper roughly when and where a parcel will be left.
Before you use tracking to sell the account, make sure the account delivers it. The order page should show the expected delivery date, the order status, the carrier and a tracking number that opens the carrier’s page in one click.
A generic promise of faster checkout is not an offer
With tracking in place, the confirmation page can make a concrete offer: set a password and follow this order, with its delivery date, in one place. That is a different proposition from a password field under the order number and a line about checking out faster next time. Baymard’s testing showed that a vague benefit, or a reward with no explanation of how to use it, achieves little more than giving no reason at all. Even so, 57% of the sites in its benchmark do not present a convincing case for creating an account.
Shoppers respond to gains they can picture: not typing their details again, seeing past orders and their status, and reordering without searching. In Baymard’s testing, a few of these set out as a bulleted list or with a clear visual caught participants’ attention better than a paragraph of text. Be precise about what is saved. If most of your shoppers pay with a bank method such as iDEAL | Wero rather than a stored card, the time saved on the next order sits mainly in address and contact details, and the list should say exactly that.
Asking before the payment costs orders
The same offer made earlier does harm. Baymard’s benchmark shows that more than half of sites, 54%, raise the account question before the order is placed instead of holding it for the confirmation page. A shopper in checkout has one goal, and a registration prompt adds a second decision that has nothing to do with buying. In testing, some participants who met the prompt hesitated and stopped moving forward. Many regarded registration as a real burden next to guest checkout, and some concluded that an account was required. Guests who had already chosen to continue without one and were then asked again felt they had to make the same choice twice.
The cost is easy to miss in your analytics. A shopper who hesitates at a registration screen and leaves is counted as checkout abandonment, not as a declined account offer. The prompt meant to build loyalty shows up as a conversion problem at a step nobody connects with it.
After the order, that conflict is gone. Nothing is at stake any more, and because address and payment details have already been entered, creating the account comes down to choosing a password. In Baymard’s testing, the offer performed better after checkout than at the start or halfway through. One line still belongs earlier: at the step where the shopper chooses between logging in and guest checkout, say that an account can be created after the order. That removes the doubt about whether registration is required and makes the later offer an expected step.
Give the confirmation page one job
The confirmation page is also where newsletter sign-ups, discount codes for a next order, surveys and app downloads tend to land. Each is reasonable on its own. Together they bury the one request that pays back on every future order. Make the account offer, tied to tracking this order, the main action on that page, and move the rest to the confirmation email or to later contact.
Start with an inventory. Place a test order as a guest and list every request your site makes from the basket to the confirmation email, with the moment each one appears. Then check your account order page against the four tracking details above, move the account offer to the confirmation page, add the line at the login step, and replace the generic prompt with three concrete benefits your account actually delivers.
Sources: baymard.com, order tracking, baymard.com, post-checkout UX and baymard.com, delayed account creation
