I recently entered into a referral deal with a certain online store, whereby my site links to the store and my organization receives a portion of the referred profits.After receiving several complaints from my site's users who were having a hard time using the referred store's shopping cart, I discovered that their shopping cart requires each new user to (a) register with the site, including creating a password and reminder question, (b) check their inbox for a verification email from the site and click on the verification link, then (c) login to the site using their email and password.  This is all required before they are allowed to start shopping.  To me this seems like if you would go to your local grocery store and be required to complete a military training obstacle course and solve a series of trivia questions before you would be allowed in the store!I am concerned that (a) this is causing lost sales which makes my referral deal less valuable, (b) is reflecting badly on my site since I am linking to it and (c) is taking up my time dealing with the complaints of my users.Since I like to always consider both sides of an issue and don't have much experience with the ins and outs shopping cart apps, I would like to find out if perhaps there is something I am missing, and there is some good reason why a shopping cart would be set up in this manner.  Are there any commonly used shopping carts that do this and why? 
any upside for shopping cart to require password creation and email confirmation?
ecommerce;shopping cart