Questions · Buy
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.
Why it happens
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.
This comes up at the Buy stage. The full treatment, including how to reproduce it and what to change, is on Checkout requires creating an account.
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