Agreed. Another roadblock I hate is requiring me to enter my full name and address before they give tax & shipping info. A simple zip code field & calculate price button should not be that hard.

Does anybody publish some decent design guidelines for online shopping sites? So many sites try to follow Amazon without realizing Amazon can get away with terrible design choices because they are so massive.

And speaking of "a simple zip code field"...

If you're going to require a zip code to ship, because you only ship to the US, wouldn't it be nice if you said so up-front, so I could avoid wasting half an hour comparing your totally effing useless-to-me products to retailers that actually want to sell to me?

Couldn't agree more; as soon as I get a whiff of a website trying to dig more information out of me than it needs to perform a specific function, my tolerance for everything else on the website drops considerably.

"To calculate shipping, please enter all your personal info, credit card and hours a day no one is at your house."

As for Amazon, you are right; I think they make up for it with good prices and an excellent shopping experience. In a way, I think they can get away with it because they are so good at what they do.

I wish to go AWS Payments would allow payments without an account though so it could be used in lieu of PayPal... but that is an aside.

The key here is that the button leading to 'register' was 'checkout', and not 'register'. Because web links are essentially blind corners, where users can't see around the corner, the process involves a certain amount of trust between the user and the guide. For example, imagine being at a fair ground, and without knowing where you were there's a sign that said 'Ferris Wheel' and following that sign took you the ticket counter instead. Sure you need a ticket to get on the ferris wheel, but you were looking for the ferris wheel and not the ticket counter. This is the same thing. Checkout should lead to checkout. Register should lead to register. Checkout shouldn't lead to register. Once you've checkedout, you can close the transaction by creating an account for future purchases, but that's only because you've already completed all the necessary work, and so creating an account becomes a value added bonus.

Simple directions, simple prompts, and mechanize the rest. (Zip Code? -- Fill in the City automatically.) as mentioned by jobu below

Yes, I too want to scream every time they want to force me to register and I have also abandoned purchases just because I do not want another account.

I hope that people take note of this advice and at least make registration optional.

This is really funny -- I actually went to purchase the book "Web Form Design" that is referenced at the top of this post. It linked to the publisher's site, and when I tried to buy it, they asked me to register with email, password, etc. So I went over to Amazon instead and bought it there!

(I realize that Amazon requires registration to purchase as well, but I already have an Amazon account of course -- but the publisher is not Amazon and if they had allowed anonymous purchase I would have gladly given them my money instead, in which case they probably would have made more profit on the sale).

And the funny thing is it's largely psychological. You're giving them almost[1] the same information whether you create and "account" or not.

[1] The only exception being a user-defined password.

[EDIT] I think I've solved this in a win-win manner on my project.

  * No register or login.
  * Detail page with link at top: "Been here before? Login to pre-fill the fields if you want to."
  * An *optional* password field with a note: "If you want an account, enter a password."
  * If the user doesn't enter a password and wants to login later, a link in the password create/reset email sets them up.

You are giving them (mostly) the same information, but the presumption when not registering is that they will only store the information as long as necessary for their internal purchase history purposes, whereas an account remains "exposed" to the web, for a seemingly indefinite period of time.

That is likely the presumption for many people. It is in general naïve I'd have to say as your information is kept for a certain amount of time for returns or disputes and longer for archival and reporting purposes.

I don't have data, but I'd veture to guess that most non-account data is stored nearly as long - if not as long - as account data. (I'm thinking primarily of ecommerce applications here. Services like pastebin are quite different.)

It's not so much a matter of giving out information or not. It's a matter of having another account to remember and look after.

I just don't want the hassle.

That's why I like the "if you want, we'll email you and then you can log in" approach to return visitors which works nicely for occasional use sites.

If the user creates a "new" account with the same email, it'll silently use the same account and not show them their history until they validate.

Yeah, it sounds like you have a pretty good solution. Especially compared to some I've seen.