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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell you how many times I've done a guest checkout, then come back to register and my order doesn't show up in the history, even if the email matches. Now I make sure to try to register first as it's such a broken experience in too many places if you don't.

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Samsung in particular advertises account registration after guest checkout with "register to track your order" -- and then it doesn't work.

I get the frustration and why it should work better. But then, why still use guest checkout ?

I totally stopped and will register an account wherever I give my credit card. The difference with guest checkout is usually infinitesimal and I actually want to keep somewhere (in my password vault in this case) the places that have my full info and where to contact them.

Generally just expected the option to save details as part of checkout. Not always the case.

One of the dumbest anti-patterns. Even major shopping cart frameworks have this problem such as spree and activemerchant.

The one who gets this mostly right is Shopify. They're the "Stripe" of shopping carts.

It's generally not done because it's a security issue as an attacker could register before you with your email and gain access to your personal info (billing and shipping address and maybe last four of credit card). What would be best if the eCommerce site would send you an email to confirm your email address to unlock your guest checkout orders. That's a fairly complicated flow for most eCommerce outfits so I think they just default to not show guest orders.

And when I click the "track your package" in the email confirmation, which guides me into "create an account" but still doesn't show?

It feels like they’re intentionally reprimanding me for doing a guest purchase when I’m actually deciding that I liked the business enough to come back. Such a customer service fumble

Part of why the vast majority of my online shopping is at very few sites, including Amazon, which I'm inclined to want to avoid but end up using anyway.

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