customer log in required?

You know if someone wanted to create a nice neat site with around 30 products as many do especially in the uk where big is not necessarily beutyful then they would be making a big mistake using Zen. Where it is without doubt a good piece of kit most of the purchase process is taken up by signing up and fannying around. More and more people are avoiding sites with sign up because they are sick of the crap that gets dumped in their inbox.

I am sure there are arguments for both sides and as we live in a democracy and reserve the right to choose all we have to do is click the Zen button which switches sign up off or on.

But then it doesnt have one does it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

tiler:

You know if someone wanted to create a nice neat site with around 30 products as many do especially in the uk where big is not necessarily beutyful then they would be making a big mistake using Zen.
There are certainly plenty of alternative methods of doing eCommerce and people should way up the options and go for what is best for them. The beauty of Zen Cart is that it can grow as your business grows. You may only use 10% of it when you first start but the other 90% is there waiting for you when you need it.

tiler:

Where it is without doubt a good piece of kit most of the purchase process is taken up by signing up and fannying around.
It really just comes down to a matter of presentation. You can present the checkout as "You must create an account first!" or as "Enter your billing information..." and an account just happens to get created in the process. If you present the checkout in the wrong way then you will scare customers off regardless or whether or not they have to choose a password.

Regards,
Christian.

hi everyone
i profit of this post to ask my question !
In fact,
i discovered a problem this week end : a customer succeeded in ordering without create any account since she had been connected on another account (without knowing it)
she lives about 500 km from the owner of the incriminated account and fact interesting, this account she used was created about only 2 hours before.
How is it possible ?
Have you ever noticed s'thing like this and how to fix it?

i'm quite late in my upgrade and am still on 1.2.5 version

thanks by advance

musikmachine:

hi everyone
i profit of this post to ask my question !
In fact,
i discovered a problem this week end : a customer succeeded in ordering without create any account since she had been connected on another account (without knowing it)
she lives about 500 km from the owner of the incriminated account and fact interesting, this account she used was created about only 2 hours before.
How is it possible ?I have not seen this, but just a guess: a shared terminal somewhere?

By the way, this is off-topic for this thread.

bakdoor:

4 years, 1,343 customers, of which 1,321 used the 'purchase without account' feature when checking out. Now, how many of those would not have bought from me if I did not have 'pwa'? No way of knowing, but I'm glad I did not have to find out the 'hard' way. Competition on the internet is fierce. EVERYTHING you can do to get and keep a potential customer is important.

How many customers have you lost by not having this feature?
TomHow does the PWA work, where is it, and how does it work?

Thanks,
Kirk

Merlinpa1969:

bakdoor, if you search you will see that this has been discussed in mass,

and the entire dev team as well as MOST ZC users do not feel the way that you do,

and that the ONLY thing extra that is required for an account is a password,

( shipping address is always required otherwise you have NO idea where to send stuff ) and PWA is a farse, it is actually very misleading to the customers, since you are in fact lying to them because you are in fact creating an account,
you are just passing a stock value in a hidden form for the password field.

the developer have stated several times that this will be addressd in a future release when the entire checkout is redone,

you can look in the anouncements forum for the roadmap of which release it is for.
I can pick up a password from my membership site using SESSION, PHP_AUTH_USER and PHP_AUTH_PW. Can I insert it into ZC and create a ZC account that way, automatically logging them in?

Thanks,
Kirk

bakdoor:

Originally Posted by Merlinpa1969 ...
it is actually very misleading to the customers, since you are in fact lying to them because you are in fact creating an account,
you are just passing a stock value in a hidden form for the password field.
In the current Internet e commerce environment, ANY opportunity to gain a paying customer, should not be overlooked. If a customer thinks that by using PWA, their checkout/overall shopping experience will be smoother/quicker, then I'm all for it. Any shop owner who does not make EVERY effort to gain a new customer, well, why bother having a store to begin with. After all, bottom line, it's all about the $$$$.
Absolutely bakdor! And if their "account" is hidden behind the scenes, then it is meaningless to the customer and only of a concern to someone who wants to make a point, or is not interested in the feature for themselves.

But then again, it is not the responsibility of the volunteers in this organization to provide anything they don't want to volunteer or feel like volunteering on their own free will.

Kirk Ward

Merlinpa1969:

I didnt deny that your clients didnt choose this method,
the farse part is the fact that you are dishonest with a customer,
yo uare in fact creating an account for this person.
thats what the statement about passing th epassword as a hidden variable was about.

Merlinpa1969, I don't see this as a "farse" (or did you mean "farce"). Think of it as merely another form of log data or session data.

and in over 3 years here I can honestly tell you that the people requesting or demanding this feature is actually quite low compared to the number of users.
But then you have had people requesting it then? Maybe ZC is being passed over by people who are looking for it. I know that is why I removed it from my server after installing it for an evaluation. I only came in here when I stumbled upon the forum as a result of another term in my search phrase. How many others have passed over ZC for the same reason. You won't hear them asking for it, because your users accepted what you had when they downloaded it.

Think of the many people like me who run membership sites and already have this information, but no way of offering a product catalog inside the membership site without alienating our members by requiring a registration inside a site they've already registered for.

My post wasnt about starting a heated discussion, merely pointing out that your state statement about no one realizing wasnt quite accurate,

the powers that be ( the ones that are giving you this software ) have stated more than once that they think it is one of the dumbest things that they have ever heard of, but that they will include this feature in a future release when they totally redesign the checkout. ( No timeframe givin )

the fact that with a few well placed statements about WHY an account is beneficial to a cleient ( since your going to have ALL of their details anyway ) is beneficial,
I need a way to give away free items in order to develop traffic (zero price point) and these folks are not going to want to register. I am also going to offer premium purchases and want to use my current shopping cart and order page.

Another person may be giving away freebies in order to build traffic for an adsense type site. Their visitors are going to be turned off by a need to register.

There are many people like me who run membership sites and already have the registration information. We merely wish to add a catalog type program to offer free and premium products to our existing members. Since we have already collected the information once, collecting it again would irritate our members and damage our business.

Kirk Ward

DrByte:

Originally Posted by dude_s ...
Have you ever shipped or received sth with a tracking number? Did you need an account with DHL, UPS or FedEx to check on it? No. You just paste in the number and get your status. There's no reason why order tracking couldn't work the same way.
How do you suppose one would get the tracking number?

Ever thought of using the invoice number or transaction number? No account required there.

Kirk Ward

BFTUK:

I'm amazed this option does'nt exist in the core code seeing as EU ecommerce policy compliance includes:

Now that is interesting! So the developers are limiting their usage base or accepting a legal liability?

Kirk

I actually put more effort into this than I want. It appears the developers do not feel it is important enough to justify their time in ...

(1) Making the sales process easier (for a good example of an easy sales process, look at John Delavera's Joint Venture Manager and Fantasos.)

(2) Picking up on the fact that if there are people using ZC asking for it then there are probably ten or twenty times that many who passed by when they discovered there was no way to eliminate the registration process before purchase. I know I'm one.

Bye bye.
Kirk

I am confused. The opposite is exactly what I want, but I am ABLE to checkout of my website without logging in to the website. Are you speaking of creating an ANY account with like PayPal.com, Google.com, etc?

IF so Does anyone know how to allow anyone to see pricing, but be required to log in to thier account with us (on the website) before having the ability to make a purchase through an online gateway?

Regards,
Jeff

Am I wrong?

Because I could swear that when I use Google Checkout, that the customer can simply go to my site, add a few products and checkout via google, without ever needing to sign up or log in to the website.

kirkward:

Now that is interesting! So the developers are limiting their usage base or accepting a legal liability?

KirkYou missed my reply to that (26th October 2007, 01:38 PM)? It's a bogus post, there is no such EU requirement.

kirkward:

I actually put more effort into this than I want. It appears the developers do not feel it is important enough to justify their time in ...

(1) Making the sales process easier (for a good example of an easy sales process, look at John Delavera's Joint Venture Manager and Fantasos.)

(2) Picking up on the fact that if there are people using ZC asking for it then there are probably ten or twenty times that many who passed by when they discovered there was no way to eliminate the registration process before purchase. I know I'm one.

Bye bye.
Kirk

Please read the zc road map,
this will be taken care of in a later release, the zc team has listened and will make these changes WHEN it falls within the pre-built timeline.

they have said ( I beleive its 1.5 ) that will get the entire checkout process rewritten and a guest account will be added then so this statement

It appears the developers do not feel it is important enough to justify their time is not anywhere near accurate,