So to repeat – I’m not being critical of collecting normal contact info from customers (name, email, phone, address) but forcing – not optional but preventing purchase – by making someone create a username and password – remains, in my opinion, a bad idea. I’ve also read several studies of online shopping and they usually mention forced checkout as an impediment to purchase completion and one factor in shopping cart abandonment. I suggest you read my article:
http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/blog/shopping-cart-abandonment/
as it notes several studies that actually interview folks who abandon shopping carts and frequently they cite things like the checkout process being confusing and taking too long – and call out forced registration as a bad thing.

Until I see data that proves otherwise, forcing customer registration is something I will continue to advise my ecommerce clients to avoid. Again, thanks very much for your comment!

I would disagree with you slightly on this one. I agree that if ticketmaster is going to have a time limit they should probably make it more realistic than 15 seconds. But if they don’t have your contact information how would you expect them to send you a receipt or order confirmation to your email and of course they want some infromation on their customer.

In the case of physical, shipped products the merchant wouldn’t be able to send you an emailed shipping confirmation or be able to contact you if your something goes wrong with your order. Finally, if in the future you were interested in your order history or wanted to ‘re-up’ on an order you wouldn’t be able to do so.

Katy mentioned she always forgets. I would recommend to use one to three (they usually lock you after 3 tries) STRONG passwords (8 characters long at least on symbol, number and capital letter – ie Pass@word1) that you can always remember for all your logins.