Playbook, online store
There was never an account, only an email address on an order
Somebody bought something, got a confirmation, and reasonably concluded they were now a customer with a login. Months later they come back to look at the order and nothing works, and they describe it as being locked out. They are not locked out. There is no lock, because there was never a door. That single explanation resolves more of this traffic on a shop than any recovery process does.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for account access problems holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The commonest cause here is not a forgotten password, it is that no account exists: the buyer checked out as a guest, received a confirmation email, and assumed that made them a registered customer.
- Order history fragments across email addresses, because people buy with a work address once and a personal address twice, and each set of orders sits silently behind whichever address was typed into the checkout that day.
- Where signing in was done through another service rather than with a password, there is no password to recover and the recovery has to happen somewhere else entirely, which almost nobody realises they did.
- Being locked out stops nothing. The parcel still ships, the refund still returns, the guarantee still stands, and saying so early removes the urgency that makes these messages arrive three times in an hour.
How it arrives
- i cant log in to my account
- i dont have an account but i ordered from you
- my email address isnt recognised
- how do i see my order history
- can you change the email on my account
- i signed up with google and now it wont let me in
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Whether checkout creates an account, and at what point | Whether guest checkout exists, whether it is the default, whether an account is created silently, and what a customer has to do to turn a past guest order into an account. This one paragraph answers the largest share of these messages on its own. |
|---|---|
| Every sign in method you offer | Password, any third party sign in, any passwordless link. What each one looks like at the login screen, and what recovery looks like for each. A customer who signed in through another service and is now hunting for a password needs to be told which door they used. |
| What an account actually gives somebody | Saved addresses, order history, tracking links, faster checkout. Written honestly, because a fair number of these people do not need an account at all and are relieved to be told so instead of shepherded through a recovery they did not want. |
| How an email address change is handled | Whether the customer can do it, whether it needs verification, and what happens to orders that sit under the old address. This is the request that cannot be self-served, so the material needs to say where it goes rather than how it is done. |
The reply
The usual cause of this is that there is no account rather than a problem with one. Our checkout lets people order as a guest, and a guest order sends a confirmation email but does not create a login, so the address works perfectly well for buying and is not recognised at the sign in screen [1]. Two things worth checking: whether you might have ordered under a different email address, since order history sits behind whichever address was used at checkout, and whether you originally signed in through another service rather than with a password, in which case there is no password here to reset [2]. Nothing about this affects an order in progress. If you need to see past orders and cannot get in, leave your name and the address you think you bought with and somebody will look.
It leads with the explanation rather than a troubleshooting sequence, because a recovery process run against an account that does not exist wastes the customer's evening. The two checks are the two causes that account for nearly everything else, and both are things the customer can test without help. Saying that orders are unaffected is deliberately near the end, once the anxiety has somewhere to go.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor needs an email address changed, two sets of orders joined up, or has orders they cannot see and has already ruled out the guest checkout explanation.
I cannot look at accounts or change anything on one. Leave your name, the email address you think you ordered with and roughly when, and somebody will check what is there and sort out the access.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never confirm or deny that an account exists for a given email address, since that answer is useful to somebody probing addresses and the shop gains nothing by giving it.
- Never tell a customer an order does not exist because it is not showing, which conflates the account with the order record and is how a real order gets treated as imaginary.
- Never offer to reset, merge, unlock or change anything, because the assistant writes into nothing and the customer will stop trying while they wait.
- Never suggest making a second account to get around it, which splits the order history further and makes any later warranty or return claim harder to evidence.
Questions
- Can it check whether an email address has an account?
- No. It has no view of any customer record and could not answer that even if it were a good idea, which it is not. It can explain why an address that works for ordering fails at the sign in screen, and that is the actual question underneath.
- How much of this is really the guest checkout?
- Enough that it belongs in the first sentence of the reply. Shops underestimate it because internally the distinction between a guest order and an account is obvious, and from outside there is nothing to see: both send the same confirmation email.
- Should we push people to create accounts to reduce this?
- That trade is worse than it looks. Forcing registration costs orders at checkout, which is the most expensive place to lose one. Explaining guest checkout properly costs a paragraph, and this page is the paragraph.
Keep reading
- Everything for a online storeDelivery cut-offs, the returns window and restock questions get asked before purchase. The one thing an assistant cannot do is find an order.
- Handling account access problems in generalLocked out, wrong email, a colleague who left, no admin remaining. Identity cannot be checked in a widget, so explain, collect, hand over.
- The reset was sent. That is the whole of what anybody here knowsThe mail is usually delivered and filtered. Where it lands, how long the link lasts, and why the shop is told nothing either way.
- Cut-offs, zones and duties: three questions wearing one set of wordsCut-off times, zone pricing and who pays the customs bill. What a shop can state as a fact, and where a fact turns into a promise.
- Answering an order status question with no order system attachedThe one question a hosted assistant cannot answer. How to say so and still move the customer forward instead of stalling them.
Try it on your own material
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