[mrweasel]

That is absolutely true, or at least I think it is. The single best thing we did it to allow our customer to do a purchase without being logged in.

If the email address entered on our checkout page is already in our database, we link that purchase to the relevant account. If the customer want to login, they can, if not, that's cool to. We get a lot of wrong matches which needs to be fixed, but that seems to be a price we can and will pay.

We have had customer adding orders to other people accounts, because their email address was entered wrong ( even though we require the customer to enter the email twice. ) and we have customers ending up with multiple account that we need to merge. Despite all the problems, customers love not having to log in before doing a purchase. It's hit and miss in a few cases, but we try to do what our customers expect, matching their purchase to their account, regardless of login credentials. That's what consumers want.

[tracker1]

We did the same thing with one of the sites at work... You can make a purchase without login, and the related emails to a given order includes a token so you can see that order's status without login.. If there isn't an account at that email, we generate one with a few space-separated random words, and email the user... password recovery is email only and pretty easy. All in all, the user experience has been pretty well received.

Now that I've seen this in practice, it would be my preferred way moving forward. It didn't/doesn't take that much effort to do things this way. The bigger issue is in the occasional phone order our demographic is mostly men 50+, so some genuinely don't have email.. we use an internal address in that case...

[tracker1]

meant, we generate an account were the password is some random words...

[twic]

Good work, sir. People know about the Three Hundred Million Dollar button < http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/ >, right? Right?

[eric_the_read]

My favourite online tea store does this too, and it's one reason I ended up eventually creating an account with them. anybody who dies this automatically gets a credibility boost in my eyes.

[ersii]

Just wanted to say Thank You. I wish more people/stores would do this.