The $300 Million Button
If you haven’t yet read it, this article called The $300 Million Button is well worth your five minutes. It’s by Jared M. Spool and posted on the User Interface Engineering Web site. I don’t want to give away the secret of the article, but it discusses a very common practice on e-commerce sites, and how it tests with end users.
Published: May 26, 2009 @ 12:50 pm —
Comments (6)
Thank you that’s a very interesting article. I’m going to have people at work read it. And maybe we will remove the requirement of registering an account to place an order. (We have a central CMS with a shopping cart system that hundreds of clients use.)
Comment by Jason — May 31, 2009 @ 6:32 am
Interesting article. I started out thinking “Yikes, I have users register on my site, I hope I’m not losing business.” Then, by the end of the article, I was thinking “Of course the registration should be optional, those guys were idiots for making it mandatory.”
160,000 password requests per day! 45% of users with duplicate accounts! I have maybe 1% of registered users with duplicate accounts and I get an admin email every time someone guesses more than three times or requests a password change. I rarely get any such emails so I’m assuming I don’t have a problem.
$300 million? Other than Amazon, I can’t think of any other website that might be making that kind of money. I’d be happy with a tiny percentage of that income.
Interesting article. I always like seeing behind the scenes issues of other websites.
Comment by Farmer Gary — May 31, 2009 @ 3:15 pm
Thanks, Jason, for your comments.
Comment by Larry — May 31, 2009 @ 8:52 pm
Hey Gary, thanks for the comments. As you suggest, I’d be really curious to know who the client/site was that has that kind of business. The important thing that many people miss is that e-commerce is as much about marketing and user interface as it is the ability for people to complete an order. That part (the code and functionality) is a given; getting people to the site and not driving them away is where the real pro sites stand out!
Comment by Larry — May 31, 2009 @ 8:56 pm
> getting people to the site and not driving them away is where the real pro sites stand out
Indeed! That’s why SEO is such a popular topic. People are still missing the point though: Google isn’t the magic bullet, it takes a decent product with a good presentation if you want to turn visitors into sales. Unfortunately, it’s a very nebulous topic, difficult to write a book on the subject with any kind of concrete, applicable answers.
Comment by Farmer Gary — June 1, 2009 @ 3:17 pm
All true. And it’s important for people to remember that Google isn’t the only way sites are found these days, even if it’s the only search engine I and maybe you and maybe pretty much everyone uses…
Comment by Larry — June 2, 2009 @ 2:36 pm