The 300 million dollar button

I found a case study today about how a popular e-commerce site made a few simple design changes and increased its annual revenue by $300 million.

Introduction

The website was a simple design: two fields, two buttons, and a link. The fields were “Email Address” and “Password”. The buttons were “Login” and “Register”. The link was “Forgot Password”. It’s a form most users on the Internet have encountered at one time or another and seems like it should be pretty straight-forward and easy to design.

The problem wasn’t with actual layout or design of the form, but where it appeared in the checkout process. If a customer wanted to checkout, they were presented with a screen to enter in their username/password (previous customers) or register for a new account (a new customer). Customers were forced to create an account.

Assumptions

The original developers of this site thought that repeat customers would be able checkout faster and that first-time purchasers wouldn’t mind the extra steps involved in the payment process.

A usability test was performed and there were many complaints. First-time users didn’t like the idea of being forced to register. Many people also didn’t want to give out details such as a personal email address for fear of getting spam/unwanted messages. Repeat customers were also frustrated. Some couldn’t remember which email address or password they used to complete their order.

The fix

The registration button was completely removed and in it’s place is now a continue button with the following text: “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.”.

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.

Original article here