Email Registration

[TeamTorquesteer]

Richard,

We now send out a newsletter to over 2000 registered members.
Many get bounced because the customer has mistyped his/her email address on registration.

Would it be possible, as part of the registration, to confirm email similar to confirm password, and if theres a mismatch it would be highlighted to the customer ?

Thanks

Martin

[Mike]

I think that's an excellent idea.

[Rich]

The main problem, I think, is how this would affect the sales process. When a customer hits the Checkout button, they technically need the fewest possible number of steps to make a purchase. Putting in this step would be quite disruptive to the process, and could be off-putting (waiting for the confirmation email to arrive, clicking the link to return back to the site, etc.).

We only recently altered our email code to include the "bounce" address. The main reason was actually to ensure that emails from our sites were able to traverse certain spam filters, something which I think has worked successfully. The bouncing of emails has always happened, it's just that you haven't been sent these emails in the past. Either the user has entered the wrong email address, or it's an old email address that has expired.

[TeamTorquesteer]

I wasnt thinking of putting it as part of the checkout process but as part of registering on the site.
When you register you have to type your password twice and it would be highlighted if there was a mismatch.
But there is no 'confirm email' box so, as in the case of a couple of my customers, they type homail.co.uk instead of hotmail then all the order confirmations etc get bounced because of an invalid address.

Martin

[Rich]

The problem is that the site registration is the same code, whether it's done in order to checkout or just because the user wants to. The "confirm password" field is a necessity, as the user can't see what they're typing (due to the *s). A "confirm email" box may be a step too far in terms of what the user is required to type.

Of course, I'm happy to hear general feedback on this issue, but I think that anything which makes the checkout procedure more complicated is probably best avoided unless absolutely necessary. And account creation, whether checking out or not, is the same system throughout the site.

[paul]

How about a compromise. I think i remember seeing some sites which pick up if the domain entered is not valid eg @yahoo.couk. This would pick up alot of the errors and tell the user immediately when entered (using ajax? - wild guess!). It must use some sort of lookup system of the extension after all there are only so many which are valid. Not sure how many or where the definitive list is however!