Guest Checkout Is the Store
The last door in the shop is often a membership desk. Many people who came to pay are asked to join first.
The last door in the shop is often a membership desk.
A surprising number of people who came to pay are asked to join first.
Many of them put the bag down and leave.
You do not lose them on the product page.
You lose them on the sentence that says create an account to continue.
They had a size.
They had a card.
They had decided. Then the site asked for a password, a second email, a date of birth, and a promise to stay.
That is not checkout.
That is a club with a till attached.
What the numbers actually say
Baymard's cart-abandonment list (updated 22 Sep 2025) puts the average abandonment rate at 70.22% across 50 studies.
A large share of that is people who were never going to buy — 42% of U.S.
shoppers abandoned because they were just browsing.
The rest is design.
Ignore the window-shoppers and the same survey says 18% left because the site wanted me to create an account.
17% left because checkout was too long.
The average U.S.
checkout, Baymard measured, still shows 23.48 form elements by default.
An ideal flow can be 12–14.
That is not a taste debate.
It is a door that is heavier than the purchase.
Baymard's guest-checkout research is blunter.
Their 2022 quantitative study (4,384 U.S. adults) found 24% had abandoned a cart in the previous quarter solely because of forced account creation. And of the sites that do offer guest checkout, 47% fail to make it the most prominent option.
The door exists.
It is behind a plant.
What "guest" actually means
Guest is not a lesser customer.
Guest is a person who will give you an email for the receipt and a street for the parcel and a card for the money, and who does not want a second login in a life that already has too many.
You can invite them to save the address after the order.
You can send a magic link. You can let the account grow from a purchase instead of blocking the purchase for an account.
Amazon trained a generation to sign in.
Amazon also trained a generation to leave any smaller shop that pretends to be Amazon at the lock screen.
How we think about it at BuonaLabs
We put pay before join.
The first button is the guest path, named in words a tired person can see.
The account is an offer on the thank-you page, not a wall on the way to it.
If a client wants a club, we build a club that you enter with a parcel already on the way.
The store is the checkout.
Everything before it is a catalog.
Everything after it is a relationship.
Do not confuse the three.
Sources
https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate
https://baymard.com/blog/make-guest-checkout-prominent
BuonaLabs is a digital innovation studio in Lübeck, Germany, building product pages, digital twins, and commerce experiences that try to tell the truth about the object. If this is the work you are trying to do, let's talk.