Ask HN: Importance of a Confirmation Email

[matt1]

I'm working on the registration form for a web app and am considering various ways to do it. There are essentially two major steps:

1. Customer enters email and chooses a password

2. Customer pays

The email and password combination would let the customer access the site on future visits, assuming they complete the payment.

My original plan was to send their email a confirmation link after the first step and that link would validate the email address and bring them to the payment page. However, it occurred to me that I might be able to skip the confirmation email all together; go straight from step 1 to step 2.

I don't really see any major downsides to doing it this way. Typos could be minimized by having them enter the email twice. Worst case, they could always email support (me) and I'd help them work through their problem. Seems like the small support tradeoff would easily worth the higher completion rates.

Not sure if I'm missing any major considerations... Could a malicious person take advantage of this system?

[jamess]

You'd be insane to ask for email conformation as part of your sales process. Go to any web store, none of them do it.

Your customer has little motivation to supply a false email address, as they may need support by email at a later date. There aren't any security implications of not confirming the email address in this case.

[matt1 → jamess]

Thanks for the feedback.

[ericwaller]

I know that when I pay for something online, I want the merchant to know my email address -- I'm expecting a receipt, shipping confirmation, etc.

You may consider using help text to indicate that they'll receive an order confirmation at the email address they provide, just in case they may not immediately realize why your asking for it.

[matt1 → ericwaller]

Good call -- I'll send customers a little "Welcome to my site" email after the process is done.

[ScottWhigham]

I got into a situation a few weeks ago like this. I downloaded trial version, liked it, and then wanted to buy. I registered for an account and was told that I could continue to purchase once my email was confirmed. Well, at the time we were on a shared hosting mail server and apparently it was about 5 hours behind. I had to wait 5 hours to purchase. I wanted the software badly so I waited but I bitched the whole time.