Monthly Archives: February 2009

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password.

We may have all seen this sort of form on any number of e-commerce sites. It’s there to help returning customers checkout quicker and direct new customers to sign-up to speed along future purchases. Seems harmless right?

I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.

New users often resent having to register for your site just to make a purchase. When you enter a brick-and-mortar store they don’t force you to register for their mailing lists before you can complete your transaction. Of course they ask – that’s to be expected.

Later, we did an analysis of the retailer’s database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.

Because many of the returning customers could not remember their email addresses and passwords used when originally signing up they resorted to creating a new account which in turn artificially inflated the database of users. Even many of the customers that requested their passwords did not go on to make a purchase presumably out of frustration with the process.

The Solution?

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “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 purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

Such a simple solution with the added benefit of eliminating a needless button.

And the results

The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

So $300,000,000 from realigning the way your form worked to cause less headache for your users. Are there any places on your site that might be costing you money? Not sure? User testing and asking your customers would be a great way to find out.

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