
The $300 Million Button - astrec
http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button
======
lockahill
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.

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Hexstream
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.

~~~
eli
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.

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mixmax
This vividly shows how important usability is.

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

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

~~~
SapphireSun
It'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.

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mattmaroon
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.

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

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

~~~
mixmax
You're right...

I went out and searched for screenshots myself, and found this one:
<http://www.webreference.com/programming/xul/amazon.png> which shows it more
clearly.

Damn, I hate being wrong :-(

And sorry Matt for being so persistent in being wrong. :-)

~~~
mattmaroon
Ha, no problem.

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

~~~
mixmax
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.

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

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rokhayakebe
The site this article is referring to could be "Coolhorse"
[http://www.coolhorse.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=OINF&St...](http://www.coolhorse.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=OINF&Store_Code=COOLHORSE)

EDIT:Although I do not see how this one could make 25B a year.

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

~~~
apsurd
looks like some good ol' oscommerce

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sh1mmer
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.

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ken
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.

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

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

