You have traffic. Your product pages look good. A customer finds what they want, adds it to the cart - and disappears.
You wonder why.
Often the answer is simpler than you think. And more expensive.
19% of customers abandon their cart just because you force them to register
The Baymard Institute surveyed thousands of online shoppers and asked directly: why didn't you complete your purchase?
19% said: the store required me to create an account.
Not because the product was too expensive. Not because shipping took too long. Simply because they couldn't buy as a guest - anonymously, without setting a password, without filling out a profile.
It's the second most common reason for cart abandonment, right after unexpected shipping costs.
What this looks like in real numbers for your store
Let's take a concrete example.
Your store does €10,000 in revenue per month. Average order value is €40 - that's 250 transactions per month.
If 500 people reach your checkout each month and half complete the purchase - your conversion rate is 50%.
Now add guest checkout. According to Baymard's data, you unlock a portion of that 19% who were leaving. Even if you recover just half of them - that's an additional 47-48 transactions per month.
At an average order of €40 - that's nearly €2,000 per month you're currently not seeing.
From changing one setting in your store.
Why stores don't implement this
The most common argument goes like this: "We want customers to create accounts so we can remarket to them later."
That's understandable - but wrong.
First: a customer who didn't buy won't come back. A customer who bought as a guest will come back if they were satisfied.
Second: most e-commerce platforms let you offer account creation after the purchase, when the customer is already happy with the transaction. That's a much better moment than before payment, when every extra form field is an opportunity to lose the sale.
Third: GDPR limits what you can actually do with the data of someone who "just" created an account anyway. The real value is in a customer who buys - not in a database of email addresses.
How to check if your store has this problem
Go to your store as an anonymous user. Add a product to your cart. Proceed to checkout.
What do you see?
If the first thing is a registration form or a mandatory login - you just found a leak.
If there is a "buy without registration" option but it's hidden, in small text, buried under the login button - that's also a problem. Users won't find it.
The right solution: guest checkout should be just as visible and accessible as logging in. Ideally as the first option.
This is just one of the issues that may be blocking your sales
Missing guest checkout is visible and relatively easy to fix. But most problems in online stores are less obvious.
Confusing mobile navigation. Missing return policy information on the product page. A checkout form that's too long. Missing price history on discounted products - which, by the way, is a legal requirement under EU law.
Each of these problems is a percentage of conversion silently leaking away.
QuoAudit audits your store automatically - it walks through it like a real customer and shows you exactly where you're losing sales. Report delivered within 24 hours.