Field notes
Guest checkout is often a second shop you have not examined
Signed-in buyers saw a wallet, a saved address, and a fraud check. Guests saw a shorter form and a different shipping quote. Both were called ‘the storefront’.
We ran the same three SKUs as a guest and as a named account on the same afternoon. Shipping to the same Petaling Jaya postcode differed by a few ringgit. The guest path skipped a wallet that would have applied store credit. The account path applied a ‘returning buyer’ rate the merchandising team did not know was still live.
None of this appeared on the homepage. Both paths used the same product photographs. Finance was reconciling one settlement file and assuming one rule set.
If more than a third of your paid orders are guest orders, treat guest checkout as a separate application in the scoping letter. It is cheaper to say that in week one than to discover it in a chargeback review.
We are not arguing for forcing accounts. We are arguing for examining both doors into the same catalogue.