Pro's & Con's of registering your customers?

[HCGDiet]

I know that making a user register will drop the the conversion rate. However, there are a lot of sites that still stand by making users register before you can purchase. I was wondering if they know something that I don't that would outweigh the loss of those conversions.

What exactly are the Pro's & Con's of making your customers register before being able to purchase an item?

[Marcus_Miller]

Great answer from RDK which covers most of it and it's hard to give more details without specifics of the store itself but in simple terms. The only real problem with registering at the point of purchase is that it may put some people off so it should be optional.

If you are making a sale you have all the data already so you don't need to take them through some painful process and you can sell the benefits of a highly simplified checkout process next time they make a purchase.

Never force it unless it is absolutely necessary but make it a positive for your customers and in return you may be able to slowly gather more information about the customers to better meet their future requirements (cross sell basically).

[RDK]

That list largely depends on the type of business.  Are your customers likely to purchase your product/service again in the future?

For one of my clients, registration requirement was a no-brainer.  They offer a complex, technical product as well as support through the purchase cycle.  The amount of information needed to close a transaction was relatively large and a returning customer is a big win for this company.  Once a user is registered, it takes seconds to fill out an RFQ and receive a response that has all of the additional information that goes into providing a quote already available.

To the contrary, if you're selling healing crystals or colon-cleansing products (not that these aren't as plausible as a cosmic muffin in the sky watching our every move), you are less likely to have a return visitor and you want to get that conversion on the first visit.

If you're somewhere in the middle, there's no reason that you can't make both options available while adding some incentive to the more comprehensive RFQ form.