Registered Users process - some thoughts

This week I made a purchase on a web site. Did not create an account. Simply went through the steps and placed the order. In the end I received the notification email detailing the order and it contained my user account including email and password as well as link to get into my account. Without having to do anything, the company I trusted enough to place an order with had the foresight to supply the credentials I would need to interact with them. I realize email isn’t secure, but there wasn’t really any data passed other than contact info and the credentials. So I would like to discuss if there’s interest in changing the RTD registration process a bit.

In this discussion here Admin Mark made some very valuable and valid points gained from years of experience. I agree with most of them (guess I need a few more years). A good point in particular is this: "We allow registration but we don't require users to register." I absolutely agree with this, but would like to take it a step further by automatically registering every user. In particular, users could be auto registered at the moment of SUBMITTING a quote or order and they would have access to past orders. That is the main reason I would want auto registration. I see no other way to get returning unregistered users hooked up to their past orders. I'm unsure about auto registering before submitting. I like that users choose to register to save designs. If they choose to do that, we have a potential customer in the system and when they do place an order, past orders will be available.

What issues would there be with already registered users who place an order without first signing in? What if a user orders on a different computer that doesn't have a cookie from previous use? etc, etc. I don't know the nuts and bolts of how the company I ordered from handles these things, but do know that I have easy access to my account even though I didn't fill a registration. I did immediately change the assigned password to something memorable.

We answer inquiries about User Registration every other day, so do others feel this is valid or valuable? Is this doable with RTD or a dangerous practice?

Technically there would be no problems, as it would mean to auto-register a user on order submittal and assigning him an auto-generated password.
At this point user should KNOW he has a password, which means he'd need to received also the RTD registration confirmation email.

But all the points and exceptions you mentioned are the parts that would worry me more.
Doing this, the only element we would have is the user's email. This means also that every check about "he's already registered", "he's a returning one", we have other orders from the same email" would need to be involved too.

But there's where I see the possible dangerous practice, thinking at possible scenarios I've already seen.
There are reasons for some customers to avoid registration precisely because they don't want an history to be visible.

This is the case of big offices (IE, ad agencies) where a central email is being used to order, but employers are not allowed to check it. They're just allowed to place the order.
An auto registration based on email would give them all a full history of all of the placed orders and ability of altering those, and I can assure you some companies do NOT want this to be possible at all.

Considering there may be customers no liking this approach for any reason, If I'd have to think at this I'd look in a different direction. The goal is to increase the registered users number because that's something potentially valuable for various reasons.
So, what if we'd think at a new yes/no option that would appear right into "place order" screen where we ask user if he'd like to also "save his info for blah blah blah"?
That way, as you're already offering registration, it would just be an extra place where user could become registered.
With an explicit YES by them, all of the issues I mentioned above would be no more, because now you're asking them if the WANT to be registered (for faster checkout in future, past order management, permanent saved designs and cliparts, etc....)
With such a button checked I could easily force an automatic user registration just before placing the orders. Customer would receive also the registration confirmation email, but expecting that. And I think everyone would feel happy with no risks of customers feeling forced to join a system.

What do you think?

Very good. Always good to hear the issues that may be faced. I like this solution and believe it will serve the purpose perfectly.

bump

It's boiling in the pot.
I'm boiling as well as here it's terribly hot these days.
You should really consider having new ideas during wintertime

But yeah, it will come. I just have some other open updates to close first (as the interpolation for pricing addons)

Hey. Right after the show. This would be an excellent project to get going.

I literally just encountered this problem last night and got on here to see if this has been an issue and here it is first thread haha, unreal.

I have done tons of transactions in the last 2 years on mycustombandmerch.com and everything is going amazing, so I was surprised this was the first time I had faced this problem. I had a customer that created some products and ordered them. Did not have a reason to save them or create an account. Knew what they wanted and just ordered it. For some reason also people are not getting their confirmation e-mails (not sure why, I have tested on my end and it seems to be working), but she never got that so she wanted to see how she could look at her order on our site.

That was the first time I even thought of this issue. There still has to be a way to look up your order, whether it be by email or some code they can enter in that goes along with their order number. I had to manually send her all the info, and then all the photos from the order that she was after. Just interesting I had never thought of this nor had I encountered it, but it is definitely an issue that needs looked at.

Hi Hoodie. Good to hear from you again. What we've found from talking to customers is that the registration thing is a hurdle and you never know about it unless you really get to know the users and tally the phone calls about it. Alex's solution combined with our own backend solutions will be the key to conquering this. It is a very valuable tool which we want to utilize to its greatest potential.

About confirmation emails. I've been researching this over the past couple weeks because it has truly become a serious issue. For us it is mainly those using gmail that are effected. Search the web along the lines of "gmail marking my mail as spam" and you will see. Googles great spam smashers are too great. There are various methods that folks are trying to keep ahead of this.

A few days ago I had a long conversation with our host about the spam treatments and what we could do about it and it doesn't look like much can be done. Our host says this is a huge problem for them. Much of their resources are being channeled to dealing with this. So at least that is reassuring to know that it is not something that we've done. Google is a "no customer service" company. It just doesn't exist. We are looking into every possible idea so if you have any suggestions, we're all ears. Our current approach is to notify customers at checkout about the spam especially if they are gmail users.

Mailchimp has some interesting insights about avoiding getting marked as spam also. Might want to check that out.

Good to see you back, Hoodie.
Looks like I have some homeworks for after the show!

As I'm not going to do anyting during this week, for now I'm just trplying to confirm I saw this.