What I had in mind would leave the site admin the option of allowing customers to create accounts. For a site with gadzillions of customers, that would probably be more convenient than answering email or the phone, but the client we're building now has a limited niche market and the user accounts on the site will have special significance.

I just want to make it possible to turn off account generation. Actually as of beta 4 the anonymous purchaser is shown their login (email address) and generated password, but when they try to use it they are told it is inactive or blocked (if the site admin selected that).

If you don't think this would be incompatible with the architecture, I'll probably write the code and submit it to the issue tracker as a patch, like I did with the payment watchdog.

Would this discussion fit better into the development forum? Thanks for all your hard work.