Stall library · Buy
Forced account creation blocks AI checkout
Forced account creation is a checkout that requires signing in or registering before it offers a payment step, which ends an AI agent journey completely. An agent shopping on someone else’s behalf has no account with you, cannot decide to make one on the shopper’s behalf, and cannot receive and click an email verification link. This is a stall with no workaround available to the agent at all.
Why the agent stops
A guest checkout is a path an agent can complete with the information it was given. An account wall is a path that requires a credential the agent does not hold and a mailbox it does not control. There is no degraded version of the journey that gets past it.
Verification makes it absolute. Even where an agent could submit a registration form, the confirmation email lands in the shopper mailbox, out of band from the conversation, and the purchase is now a task the shopper has to finish by hand. At that point the assistant has not saved them anything.
How often we see this
Not stated here. A frequency means nothing without the cohort it was counted over, and this page is about one stall rather than one category. Where a category has enough stores measured at every stage, the share of them showing this stall is published on its benchmark page, with the methodology beside it.
See it for yourself
- Open your store in a private window with no session.
- Add a product to the cart and start the checkout.
- Look for whether a payment step is offered without signing in or creating an account, and whether a password field appears before one.
- Check the account creation path too: if registration requires clicking a link in an email, an agent cannot complete it even where it can fill the form.
What to change
- Offer guest checkout. For agent traffic this is the difference between reachable and not.
- If you want accounts, create them after the order from the details already collected, and invite the shopper to set a password afterwards.
- Do not require email verification before payment.
- Check that no app has reinstated the account requirement. This is a setting that gets switched on by loyalty and wholesale apps as a side effect.
What Ottom looks at
Ottom raises this finding when the checkout presents a password field and no payment field, which is the observable shape of an account wall. The finding records the step of the journey it stopped at, so the report shows how far the agent got before the wall.
Questions
Must we drop accounts for loyalty points to let agents buy?
No. Collect the order first and create the account from it afterwards. The requirement to be an account holder before paying is what blocks the agent, not the existence of accounts.
Why does an agent not just create an account?
Some will try, and then stop at the verification email, which arrives in a mailbox the agent does not read. A journey that requires a human to go and click something has stopped being agent mediated.
Is forced account creation the same as asking for an email?
No, and the difference matters. Collecting an email at checkout is normal, agents supply one, and ours is a published synthetic address so you can tell instantly which orders came from us. The stall is requiring an authenticated session, a password, a confirmation link, before a payment step is offered at all. One is a field on a form. The other is a door that needs a key nobody gave the visitor.