On 7 Feb 2005, at 11:52 AM, Simon Wilcox wrote:
On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, Greg London wrote:
Can an online store sell stuff over the web without requiring a password and user account for customers?
The business question is why would they want to ?
Most people who buy online are familiar with the concept of creating an account/registering before buying. If you break that model, you need to have a good reason to do so. Either it is cheaper to do it a different way or more expensive. Either way, the choice to do it is dependent on the change in sales to be expected as a result of doing things differently.
For what it's worth, whenever I have the option, I prefer not to create an account. There are a few sites I have accounts on (places that I expect to do repeat business with; Amazon, for example), but otherwise if given a choice I always opt not to create an account. In fact, several times I have declined to purchase an item because I didn't want to have to create an account.
The big problem with accounts is that you have to remember the password. Which means that either you need to have a list somewhere if you do the secure thing and have a separate password for each site, or you need to have a small number of passwords which you use for all sites. The problem with the latter is that the site then has your password for a number of different sites; while the site may not be able to do much with it, I'm starting to get more paranoid as time goes by (I fully expect to be looking into shack prices in Montana in a few years :-).
$0.02
Ricky
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