February 22, 2023
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The benefits of customers creating an account is that you can more effectively target them using email marketing. Once they end up on your site again they are far more likely to buy if they already have an account with you.
Here are two ways to encourage them to create accounts without reducing your conversion rate.
On the checkout completion page for unregistered customers, make a clear section at the top of the page that suggests the user creates an account. Since you've gathered their email during checkout, you just need to ask for a password. This technique is used on booking.com and works effectively.
This is how Amazon and Asos do it. At the start of the checkout process, ask the customer, if they already have an account. I suggest on half of the screen you add an email and password field, and on the other half you have a 'create an account' page, like on the image above.
Existing customers can sign in at this point to retrieve their details, new customer can continue and create an account later by entering their password on the checkout form.
Keep the wording minimum, like the Asos example above, and ensure you don't make checkout harder for new customers by forcing crazy validation on new passwords, make it ultra-easy by just checking password length.
My favourite technique is a combination of both, a minimal account creation step at the start followed by a request to enter a password post-checkout if they aren't an existing user and haven't chosen to create an account.
