Magento is a great shopping cart system with an excellent one page checkout. Unfortunately, many other shopping carts out there have a very long checkout process. Ecommerce shoppers like myself generally do not want to enter additional information, set up additional accounts; so they opt for guest checkout. In my experience as a ecommerce store owner, many customers have a change of heart and like to be able to get status updates about their order. A great feature would be the ability to convert guest checkout customers to general/wholesale,etc. customers. Based on the existing setup, I see two possible ways of implementing this:
1. In the backend, under a guest checkout customers sales order, the customer group should have a dropdown or a button that changes their group from not logged in to general/wholesale, etc…
2. In the frontend, if a guest checkout customer tries to create an account with an email address that matches a previous orders email address, the customer would be sent an email to confirm their account then give them access to all previous orders and account information under that email address.
The second feature request is to have the ability to show guest checkout customer under the manage customers list.
I would also love to see both of these. I think it is very important. Any idea from the dev team if we might see something like this? I know osCommerce as well as a few others have it or addons that let you do it.
Here’s another request for this feature. Minimizing friction during checkout is key to increasing conversion, but ultimately it would be great to be able to convert those customers to full accounts down the road if they want to.
alright ill take this one too.. im working on a beta for this now. It should take me a few days to get this fully working and tested. Ill post back with the link to the extension once ive completed it.
Any other ideas for how this could be done? I just purchased something from another shopping cart that automatically created an account for you with the email address you entered as the login and the shipping zip code as the default password.
Maybe something like that would work if automatically created behind the scenes?
How would you manage two orders for guest checkout from the same e-mail if an account is auto-created? Here are some solutions:
On the second order:
1) Force the user to login with the password they do not know because it was an auto-generated random string they saw in an e-mail address 6 months ago… Not good for sales.
2) Force the customer to go through guest check out with a new e-mail address.... Not good for sales
3) Allow a normal guest checkout without account auto-creation if an account already exists with that e-mail address
I’ve got a beta ready for testing. I am accepting a few beta testers at this point for testing the product before it becomes a stable licenced version. Feel free to email me directly at . This offer will be good for the next couple of weeks and then i will be releasing the stable copy in magento connect.
I too would be interested in these features, especially skicraves idea of auto generating the account using the email as login and post/zip code as password..
Failing that just an option on the sales order to convert the customer from NOT LOGGED IN to another group.
In a related vein does anyone have a general idea as to the ratio of customers who use guest checkout to those who register? I realise this is dependent on site content and of course checkout design and incentives but even so, anyone got a handle on this?
Ultimately the need for retailers to communicate and achieve further sales with their customers has to be balanced with the customers need to have as simple and pain free a relationship with their retailer as possible. Requiring a customer to register before buying seems barmy to me. Asking them if they’d like to register but don’t have to seems optimistic. Surely there’s a middle way?
Just checking back in with an update. Extension has completed beta and should be live on magento connect this week. Ill follow back up with the link. Please email me directly with any questions @
