To complement what LostKobrakai said, the bigger platforms have a competitive advantage in requiring for people to create accounts: by doing so, users will be more likely to come back there to buy, and they want to sell often in order to promote their delivery subscriptions. Of course it only works because they are alrealdy in a position of monopoly, or at the very least are big and extensive enough to compel people to register.
I think for smaller platforms, and especially for the more specialised ones that do not really hope to sell a product twice or thrice to the same client, itâs much better to not force people to register. Itâs always a nice option to give, but it should remain that: optional, for easier purchases later on.
BTW to complete the first purchase, the user will have to give his name and address, as well as email in order to receive updates about his purchase. The only thing lacking for the creation of a ârealâ account is a password, so the only difference between âcreate an accontâ and âdo no create yetâ is one password field.
To be more extensible on the template level, it would be good to have something like âextendsâ and âblockâ.
The Erlang CMS Zotonic is using erlydtl, which have the extends and block tags. Zotonic Template Inheritance
We are using Shopware (PHP-Ecommerce System) and it works really nice with template inheritance. Shopware Template Inheritance
I have worked in the begin of my career as a freelancer with the Prestashop ecommerce platform, and I used to do a lot of work for a top 10 store in my country, and when they introduced checkout as guest, they increased a lot the sales figures, for the complete surprise of the owner, not mine ;).
So my recommendation is to make it easy as possible for people to buy without the need to login, because after the first purchase you can get them to transform the guest account in a real account with a good discount voucher or any other kind of promotion.
Keep coming back to this topic from time to time because I still think Elixir would be a good base for Ecommerce.
For theme development you would need something like blocks that the theme developer can extend.
How could something like that be approached or is there possibly a more âfunctionalâ solution?
In Shopware you have really hundreds of blocks that you can specifically overwrite in your own theme.
