AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Upon clicking on the Paypal Express Checkout, the user is redirected to PayPal to log in. They enter their login/password information, and then they are redirected to the store for shipping options... logged in to the store. AbleCommerce automatically creates an AC User from the paypal login and logs them in.

As this user is never prompted to create an account or supply a password, the only way this user can ever log back into this account is to put items in their basket and click on Express Checkout. The only real problems I see with this is that the user can't really log back in at will, and can never register for a normal store account using this email address.

Why is AbleCommerce set up this way?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Express Checkout and having all these pseudo-accounts?

Basically, I need to understand this to the end of deciding what to do for my client. Of the two ways you can check out using paypal standard, Express Checkout is the only one from which you are able to tell whether the shipping address is confirmed (a security feature we like very much), but it comes with this User account weirdness.

Has the customer tried requesting a password reset email? Maybe that is the only problem for the new account - a password set automatically.

this is something that I cannot test yet since we're using PayPal sandbox at the moment and the email addresses are dummies.

Either way, it's still a major problem as paypal is going to be our only payment method when we launch.

I seem to remember that this automatic account creation / login scheme was something required of us when integrating PayPal Express Checkout. That is part of the benefit of using an express checkout model. You do not have to remember login information for all of the stores that you shop at.

I'd have to go back over PayPal's specifications, but I vaguely remember there are restrictions on what we can and can't ask the customer to do. One of those things we can't do is ask the user to create an account.