The $300 Million Button

http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button

by astrec • 18 years ago

113 43 18 years ago

uie.com

mixmax6• 18 years ago

This vividly shows how important usability is.

scott_s• 18 years ago

It also shows how much users resent registration - which comes up here at least once a day.

jmtulloss• 18 years ago

It'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• 18 years ago

Indeed. 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• 18 years ago

Yep. Why does it seem like most new sites still roll their own reg? OpenID/Facebook Connect/etc all seem like better choices.

astrec• 18 years ago

Another 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!

gruseom2• 18 years ago

I appreciate the core point about the form. But something in me hesitates to believe that this all happened quite the way he says.

mixmax6• 18 years ago

I did usability for a retail site two years ago that had pretty much the same problem, and solved it the same way.

I would say that the numbers are probably accurate.

gruseom2• 18 years ago

Ok, you I trust. That other guy... :)

jfornear• 18 years ago

This is more about obstacles in their checkout process rather than any button, but still important lessons to keep in mind.

mattmaroon4• 18 years ago

This 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• 18 years ago

Probably. Amazon's market cap is ~$21b now, which makes sense with "the message I received from the CEO of the $25 billion retailer".

mixmax6• 18 years ago

Amazon wouldn't make such an obvious mistake. besides they would have found it in a/b split tests which they use extensively.

staunch2• 18 years ago

Not 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.

mattmaroon4• 18 years ago

They definitely would have years ago.

potatolicious2• 18 years ago

They may have in the past. As it is now it'll ask you for an email address, make the sale, and remember any relevant information if you want to sign up after, including your CC if you want to make it your account's default payment option.

mattmcknight• 18 years ago

Uhh...wrong. Check this out: http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/02/26/amazon-shopping-cart/

vlad2• 18 years ago

Nearly every big company uses a/b splits extensively.

Also, by your logic, every time a big revenue increasing optimization is found, one could say "if this were true, (that company) would have already found it had it existed."

russell• 18 years ago

Not Amazon. The article said that customers purchasing went up immediately by 45%, $15M per month. Since the company was at $25Bn it was obviously a brick-and-mortar company.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

The site this article is referring to could be "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.

staunch2• 18 years ago

I think there's some shopping cart software that has similar language in it. That's probably what Coolhorse is using.

apsurd• 18 years ago

looks like some good ol' oscommerce

whatusername• 18 years ago

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=AMZN Much more likely.

Hexstream• 18 years ago

I 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• 18 years ago

Are there any good standard tools already out there that handle this type of tracking?

eli• 18 years ago

I 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• 18 years ago

It 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

"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• 18 years ago

Jared 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• 18 years ago

Wow this is very interesting but makes perfect sense. People just don't like registering for websites.

sh1mmer• 18 years ago

It'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.

The $300 Million Button

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