The $300 Million Button

On “User Interface Engineering” Jared Spool talks about an experience that changed an online business forever.
It was the removal of one tiny user form that is required on every website that increased the sales with extra $15M in the first month. And an additional $300M in that year.

To discover what was driving the customers away, the CEO decided to hire some usability experts. After they conducted a series of tests they discovered the head slapper. The customers were annoyed that after they spent time adding the products in their cart, to purchase they needed to create an account. So they would just exit the site. They “didn’t want to create a relationship”, they wanted to buy

So far so good, the replacement of this form with a continue button brought the revenues

The story seems pretty much unbelievable but it can easily be true. Some questions are to be asked though. The author says that this increased the business revenues by 45%. This means the company was bringing good money already. How come an ecommerce site with this kind of revenues was not making use of any form of analytics?? Even the most basic free analytics tool will tell you where your users are exiting your site.

Not only that, but Google Analytics for instance (very easy to install, free) gives you a funnel view of your users path. You can see where they enter, what they see on their way and at what point they made their exit.
You’d think that every internet business that can bring more than $100M online a year knows the basics…

You can read this article on UIE.com