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The $300 Million Button
- rokhayakebe 18y agoThe site this article is referring to could be "Coolhorse" http://www.coolhorse.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=OINF&Store_Code=COOLHORSE http://www.coolhorse.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=OINF&St... EDIT:Although I do not see how this one could make 25B a year.
- staunch 18y agoI think there's some shopping cart software that has similar language in it. That's probably what Coolhorse is using.
- apsurd 18y agolooks like some good ol' oscommerce
- whatusername 18y agohttp://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=AMZN http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=AMZN Much more likely.
- mixmax 18y agoThis vividly shows how important usability is.
- scott_s 18y agoIt also shows how much users resent registration - which comes up here at least once a day.
- jmtulloss 18y agoIt's not quite as obvious for a shopping site. Users are going to all the necessary information anyway, but if you pose the question as "Would you like to save this information" at the end instead of "Create an account to get started", it makes a world of difference.
- FalconNL 18y agoIndeed. Though there are some fairly easy steps to reduce this as much as possible. 1. Give guests full use of all the features of the site. Posting, editing, befriending, etc. Store this information by identifying them by the combination of IP + username (which they have to enter for each post) or something similar. This will encourage them to participate (no barrier to entry) and let them decide whether or not they want to become a full member. 2. If they register, link everything they posted while they were guests to the new account, i.e. change the username on all the old posts (if necessary), etc. That way they don't lose all their stuff. 3. The only required information should be a username and password. An e-mail address should be optional, with a warning that if you don't provide one you won't be able to recover your account if you lose your login details. Naturally you should be able to provide one later if you decide you really don't want to lose the account. This keeps the "You just want to send me spam" people happy. 4. No mandatory confirmation email. When you click submit on the registration form you should be logged in and ready to go. Opening your mail client/website is an unnecessary and annoying step. I might have missed one or two points, but adhering to these rules should take the majority of the pain out of registering.
- arjunb 18y agoYep. Why does it seem like most new sites still roll their own reg? OpenID/Facebook Connect/etc all seem like better choices.
- SapphireSun 18y agoIt's a usability nightmare. No one knows what OpenID is, I only heard of Facebook Connect from you mentioning it. I once tried to establish an OpenID account for stackoverflow, but it was too much of a hassle so I didn't bother registering. Users can just reuse names and passwords. It sucks from a security perspective, but unless you can make it transparent to the user, you're pretty much boned because no one will want to use it.
- potatolicious 18y agoBecause facebook may not be around next year. In fact, given the way things are going for them, I would not be surprised if your site outlived theirs. When it's something as crucial as keeping track of your customers and users, don't "outsource" it unless there is a very, very compelling reason.
- markessien 18y agoFacebook covers only a small percentage of people online.
- astrec 18y agoAnother of my favourite examples from Luke Wroblewski's book is "A Case Study of Explosive Ordnance Disposal" by Jack Moffett: "When “Number of Deaths” is one of the field labels, you can be certain that every design decision is an important one." Fairly vivid too!
- gruseom 18y agoI appreciate the core point about the form. But something in me hesitates to believe that this all happened quite the way he says.
- jfornear 18y agoThis is more about obstacles in their checkout process rather than any button, but still important lessons to keep in mind.
- mattmaroon 18y agoThis must be Amazon right? I mean, you can count on one hand the number of retailers that do $300m total online, let alone some multiple.
- aneesh 18y agoProbably. Amazon's market cap is ~$21b now, which makes sense with "the message I received from the CEO of the $25 billion retailer".
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- mixmax 18y agoAmazon wouldn't make such an obvious mistake. besides they would have found it in a/b split tests which they use extensively.
- staunch 18y agoNot that I know anything about Amazon specifically, but I wouldn't be so sure. Sometimes it's hard to step back and change something as fundamental as requiring users to register before they purchase. Even if people inside the company had said it was a good idea it might have taken and outside "expert" to get it done.
- mixmax 18y agoin usability this is a pretty common mistake that most people in the field would know about. besides, as I said, even if they are dilletantes they would have caught it in split testing.
- mattmaroon 18y agoThey definitely would have years ago.
- mixmax 18y ago
- Hexstream 18y agoI think an implicit lesson in this story is that you should have a system to track the way visitors travel through your site (access patterns). With this in place they could have seen at a glance from the very beginning that a lot of customers balked at the register form immediately before checkout.
- arockwell 18y agoAre there any good standard tools already out there that handle this type of tracking?
- eli 18y agoI agree, but knowing the bounce rate of that page doesn't necessarily indicate that the login form was the issue. You may be surprised at how high the the "cart abandonment" rate is on ALL e-commerce sites. With nothing to compare to, perhaps they just assumed those people were a lost cause.
- lockahill 18y agoIt must be Best Buy. Their checkout copy is quoted in this thread from 2005, and matches the article exactly. http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum22/4423.htm http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum22/4423.htm "you do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout." "to make your future BestBuy.com purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout." Best Buy had close to $25 bil in revenue in 2004 and 2005.
- ken 18y agoJared Spool is also a fantastic speaker. If you ever get a chance to see him give a talk (e.g., at a SIGCHI meeting), by all means do.
- theklub 18y agoWow this is very interesting but makes perfect sense. People just don't like registering for websites.
- sh1mmer 18y agoIt's interesting that users assume you are jerks when you ask them to register no matter what your brand, or the information you ask for. Registration has become synonymous with ways to sneak in email newsletters.