Scroogle Relay

Checkout without the email field

Every forced sign-up costs you baskets. Relay mints a private, disposable address for each order - your customer flies through checkout, your couriers still reach them, and nobody's real inbox changes hands.

One REST call per order Guaranteed non-clashing addresses Swiss zero-access infrastructure
The problem

The email field is a tax on conversion

Somewhere between "add to basket" and "pay", you ask a stranger for the keys to their inbox. Some pay the tax. A lot of them don't.

1 in 4

UK shoppers say they've abandoned a basket rather than create an account. The order was ready. The money was ready. The email field killed it.

60%

say marketing follow-up makes them give a fake or throwaway address - which then quietly breaks the dispatch and tracking emails they actually wanted.

Whole segments

of privacy-conscious buyers simply leave. They won't hand a real inbox to a shop they met four minutes ago - and they're often your highest-margin customers.

Honesty note: the first two figures are rounded from published UK basket-abandonment research and our own merchant surveys. Treat them as directional, not gospel - then check them against your own checkout analytics, which will make the same point.

How it works

Four steps, none of them visible to your customer

Relay sits between your order pipeline and the customer. Everyone who needs to write, writes. Nobody who doesn't, can.

1

Your store calls Relay

At checkout your store makes one call to the Relay API - and shows the guest no email field at all. Name, address, payment, done.

2

We mint an address

Relay mints a single-purpose address like ord-k29d7485@scrooglemail.com - guaranteed never to clash with any address we have ever issued - tied to that one order and nothing else. Want a whole email-less account? The acc- flavour mints one per customer instead.

3

Everything still arrives

Your OMS, marketplace and courier write to that address exactly as normal - and every message also forwards straight back to the operations address you nominate, so your side of the thread never goes dark.

4

The customer reads it all

They open an account-less portal - a secure link plus a short order code shown on the thank-you page and printable receipt. No inbox, no password, no app.

Optional, and entirely the customer's call: they can later attach a real email address to the order, and their portal messages follow them there from that moment on. Their choice, made after you've delivered - which is exactly when trust is highest.

The details that matter

Built for operations, not just privacy

Privacy features that break your dispatch desk aren't features. Relay was designed with the people who answer "where's my order?" tickets in the room.

Expiring addresses

Each relay expires N days after it's minted - you pick N, and delivery webhooks can extend the clock when a parcel runs late. A leaked or scraped list goes stale by design: every address on it stops existing.

A domain inboxes already trust

Relays live on scrooglemail.com - a real mail domain with years of sending reputation and strict SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Zero DNS work on your side, and nothing for a courier's spam filter to squint at.

Webhooks

message-received, portal-opened and relay-expiring events push straight into your OMS, so your systems know what the customer knows - and when.

Spam firewall

Only senders attached to the order can write to the relay. A courier can. A marketplace can. A list broker who bought the address cannot - it bounces.

Your desk keeps the thread

Because every relay forwards back to you, support can see the dispatch note landed at 14:02 without asking anyone. "Where's my order?" tickets close with the whole story already on screen.

GDPR-friendly by construction

You never store a real customer email for guest orders, because you never receive one. Your Article 30 record shrinks, and so does your breach surface.

Drop-in integration

One call at checkout. That's the integration.

Mint a relay when the order is placed, print the order code on the thank-you page and the receipt, and you're live. Everything else - routing, expiry, the portal - is our problem.

  • Official plugins for WooCommerce, Shopify and Magento - no API work needed for the common platforms.
  • Full sandbox environment with test relays and a fake courier, so you can rehearse the whole lifecycle before a real customer touches it.
  • Median mint latency under 80 ms from London - the relay exists before your payment provider has finished thinking.
mint-relay · api.scrooglemail.com
# Mint a relay when the order is placed
POST https://api.scrooglemail.com/v1/relays
Authorization: Bearer sk_live_...

{
  "type": "order",
  "order_ref": "WEB-48291",
  "forward_to": "orders@thefernstore.com",
  "expires_in_days": 45,
  "portal": true
}

# 201 Created
{
  "address": "ord-k29d7485@scrooglemail.com",
  "portal_url": "https://portal.scrooglemail.com/t/9f2kq...",
  "order_code": "RLY-7H2K4",
  "expires_at": "2026-08-16T00:00:00Z"
}

# "type": "account" mints a permanent acc- relay instead
Relay pricing

Priced per relay, not per surprise

A relay is one order's address, portal and lifecycle. You pay for what you mint. No platform fee ambush at renewal.

Starter

For stores testing the water

£29 /month + VAT

500 relays included, then 4p per relay

Talk to sales
  • 500 relays a month included
  • Order (ord-) and account (acc-) relays
  • Customer portal included
  • Email support

Scale

For marketplaces and big carts

Custom

Volume pricing, agreed per contract

Talk to sales
  • Volume relay pricing
  • Dedicated infrastructure
  • DPA + security review support
  • Named engineer

Prices ex VAT. Billed in GBP, CHF or EUR.

Merchant questions

The things every ops team asks us

What if the customer loses the portal link?
The short order code on their receipt and thank-you page recovers it - they type the code in at the portal and confirm their delivery postcode. The code alone is useless without that postcode check, so a receipt found on a train doesn't open anything.
Can customers reply to couriers through the portal?
Yes. Replies relay outward from the order address, so "leave it with the neighbour at number 12" reaches the courier looking like a perfectly normal email from order-k7f2@relay.yourbrand.com. The courier never needed a real inbox; they needed an answer.
What happens after the relay expires?
Inbound mail stops, and the portal becomes read-only for 90 days so the customer can still check the receipt or warranty note. After that, the content is deleted. The customer can export everything from the portal first - it's their correspondence, not ours and not yours.
Is this compatible with our marketing consent flow?
Yes, because Relay is transactional-only by design. If a customer opts in to marketing, they give you a real address on purpose - at which point you have a genuine, consented subscriber, which is worth ten scraped ones. Relay just stops you collecting the other kind by accident.
Do you see our customers' messages?
No. Relay content is encrypted at rest exactly like every Scroogle mailbox - our staff cannot read it, and neither can yours. What both of you can see is delivery metadata: that a message arrived, from whom, and when. Read about the underlying model on our security page.

Stop taxing your checkout.

Tell us your platform and your monthly order volume, and we'll come back with a sandbox key and a straight answer on price - usually the same working day.

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