This is an opinion piece. The views are the author’s own.
I wanted to buy a replacement filter for a humidifier. It cost $14. Before the store would take my $14, it wanted me to choose a password, confirm my email, agree to receive “exclusive offers” and, in one memorable case, tell it my birthday.
I did not want a relationship. I wanted a filter.
Here is my modest proposal for every online store heading into the holiday shopping season: put a big, obvious “Check out as guest” button at the top of the checkout page, and stop treating account creation as the price of admission. It’s better for shoppers, it’s safer for everyone, and, inconveniently for the stores that resist it, it’s better for sales too.
Shoppers Have Been Saying This for Years
This is not just me being cranky, although I am. The Baymard Institute, a research firm that studies checkout design, has asked shoppers for years why they abandon online carts. In its current figures, 18% of shoppers who quit a purchase for a reason other than browsing said the site wanted them to create an account. That puts forced sign-ups in the same league as a checkout that’s too long or a site that crashes.
An earlier Baymard survey of 4,384 U.S. adults found that 24% had abandoned at least one order in the previous three months solely because they were made to register. Not because of price. Not because of shipping. Because of the account.
Even stores that technically offer guest checkout often hide it. Baymard found that 47% of the sites it benchmarked don’t give the guest option top billing on the account step. In its usability tests, people hunted around for it, and some, especially on phones where the button sat below the fold, assumed it didn’t exist and gave up.
So the answer to “Do customers mind?” is in, and it’s yes.
Every Account Is Another Thing to Leak
The bigger reason to stop forcing accounts is security. Every account a store makes me create is one more database holding my name, address, phone number, order history and, very often, a saved card. It’s also one more password that I either have to invent and track or, being human, reuse.
The Identity Theft Resource Center counted 3,322 data compromises in 2025, a record. The number of victim notices fell sharply from 2024’s enormous total, but it was still close to 279 million. Each of those notices started with someone holding data they had collected, sometimes data nobody needed to keep.
I’ve already argued on this site that password rules are making us less secure. Forced accounts make the problem worse. The safest password is the one that never needed to exist, for an account I’ll use once in 2026 and then forget until the breach notification arrives in 2029.
“But We Need the Data” Isn’t a Customer Benefit
To be fair to the stores, accounts aren’t pointless. They let returning customers track orders, reorder quickly and skip typing an address again. For a pharmacy I use every month, I’m happy to have one.
But be honest about who the mandatory version is really for. It’s for the marketing list. It’s for the follow-up emails. It’s for the “we noticed you left something in your cart” nudges. Those are business goals, and a store is entitled to pursue them. It just shouldn’t hold my $14 humidifier filter hostage to get there.
There’s a better deal sitting in plain sight, and Baymard’s own recommendation describes it: let people check out as guests, then offer to create an account on the confirmation page, after the purchase. By then I have my order number and a reason to say yes. You’ve earned the ask instead of extorting it.
What Good Checkout Looks Like
None of this is hard. A decent checkout:
- Puts a clearly labeled “Guest Checkout” button at the top, as a real button rather than a faint text link.
- Asks only for what’s needed to deliver the order and take payment.
- Leaves the marketing checkbox unchecked.
- Offers an account after the purchase, with a plain explanation of what you get.
- Lets someone whose email is already on file keep checking out as a guest instead of forcing a password reset mid-purchase.
Plenty of stores already work this way. They aren’t going broke. They’re just not making customers fill out a membership application to buy a filter.
My Holiday Wish
Shoppers are about to spend weeks clicking through checkout pages. Every one of them that demands an account before taking our money is making a small bet that we care more about the product than our time and our data.
I’d like stores to lose that bet. Until they do, I’ll keep doing what roughly a quarter of the shoppers in Baymard’s survey had done: closing the tab and buying it somewhere that lets me in without a password. Like a store with a door.
More on Contoh
- Password Rules Are Making Us Less Secure, and the Experts Already Said So
- How to Check Whether Your Passwords Have Been Leaked (iPhone and Chrome)
- No, I Will Not Rate My Experience