Technologically speaking, authentication & authorization should precede an online purchase, but a credit card is sufficient authentication and authorization, and registration is not needed.

I guess google checkout helps as users dont have to register anyway.

This was my experience exactly, trying to purchase concert tickets on line with Ticketmaster.
The registration process (required) fouled up when it realized I already had an account. (of course I didn’t remember my password) Same process. Add to it the fact that you are under a time limit, 2 or 3 minutes before it cancels and you have to start all over again. PLUS my credit card number had recently changed and so was different than the one they had on file, which meant I had to delete all information in my account and re-enter… and that’s when the time ran out. I gave up and called their automated phone line to purchase tickets.
This was an even worse process which I won’t go into now. I went back on line, took a deep breath and started again. In all it took over 25 minutes to purchase two tickets. This was today. I will avoid Ticketmaster whenever I can.

For users to determine the cost of advertising their wares to sell, they had to register first. Many users abandoned the process at this stage. We moved the Register button to the end of the costing process, at which point users had made a significant effort in creating their ad and they understood the value proposition. Then they were happy to establish a relationship.

The result was a 25% increase in transactions in the first month.

Very interesting parallels with the training projects I do in large corporations.

Ideally we learn as much about the people who will be going through the training as possible before we design it, but some clients see that as a low-return investment of time and money.

Happily I’ve gotten better at being able to show the value of it, but at times it’s still a tricky balance – giving them enough of what they believe they need now, to help them refine their sense of those needs and what will work as the project unfolds.

This is my first trip to your writing. Thanks, I enjoyed it.
A.J.

I read over it several times and I still wonder what the purpose of this screen is: the customer clicks on the button ‘checkout’ and gets a screen with a ‘continue’ button that they need to click in order to actually checkout, as they originally requested. Uhm, since those designers (and developers, I presume, since the workflow needed to be reworked) are busy anyway …

1) At 25$ billion annually there isn’t many retailers according to the fortune 500 list. Even if you go from 20 to 30 billion.
2) The company isn’t a pure e-commerce retailer, Amazon is leading the pack there and they are not even doing $25 billion annually.
3) If it is not a e-commerce retailer it is likely that their e-commerce portion is a small portion of the $25 billion due to historical reasons. (point 4 validates this)
4) The article says that purchases increased by 45%, which suggests that they had a turnover of about $30 million a month online prior to the change.
5) A 160k pw requests a day? wow that is impressive. That means they are having probably over 250k to 400k visitors a day and make just about 1milion a day. (doesn’t prove anything but that this retailer
has a headache, lots of feet and a very crap conversion ratio, they make around 4US per visitor)

Interestingly though there seemed to be no solution offered to the problem of multiple registrations (45% is unbelievable!). So after some thought, I have proposed one, of sorts, on my blog : http://petewilliams.info/blog/?p=7

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on my suggestion.

Pete

Hopefully this article doesn’t just lead to rethinking retail registration problems, but removing roadblocks for users across the board.

My own personal reason is that I don’t want my credit card details stored with ANY online store, no matter how trustworthy.

I’ve often presumed that online stores like Amazon have tested, and found that requiring registration increases sales (presumably repeat business?) – but maybe they didn’t test after all, and just assumed…

Thanks for the great article!

Paul Hancox

Your story resonates strongly with me because I have so often worked on improving government web sites and forms which require a lot of information. However, (false) assumptions that a so-called “captive audience” has to do what you want — so “usability isn’t all that important” — certainly isn’t limited to one arena!

Back in the early part of the century, I started to shop at a web site which required me to create an account simply in order to put an item into their shopping cart. I badly wanted one particular product: a trademarked T-shirt design which I knew was only available from that brand. So I dutifully — if reluctantly — registered.

However, after shopping around for a little while longer because I had gone to the trouble to register, which was very probably what they wanted to achieve, I suddenly realized that my anger about their ill-considered process had trumped my desire to own the item I originally wanted. What I would associate with wearing it would be the irritation I was feeling right then, the online equivalent of encountering a salesperson who turns you off so much that you leave a store and never return. So, I did exactly that… no doubt the opposite of what they had wanted to achieve by forcing folks to register!

Making the “Registration” step not required I’m sure helped unregistered users wanting to move ahead with their purchase. But what about registered users? was Login also made optional at this point? (I’m thinking Amazon, where it is required early in the checkout process) If not, was there anything done to alleviate the 160,000 passwords requests(and subsequent 75% non purchases) that this step generated? Just curious!

Thanks again, great article!

On part about UIE that I usually find more often than not than a lot of the time, most big problems are easily fixed by using Best Practices, and that those Best Practices make a big difference whenever implemented because most implementations as-is are usually very bad!

Its nice when a site/business helps by registering/remembering key information for you without having to re-type it in but gets out of the way when in the “buying flow” Its annoying though when the site will not accept key information like international credit cards at the end of the whole “choosing and entering personal information” stage

Question — In your experience, do you ever notice that people feel more rushed or they perceive the need to get to the end faster when buying stuff online? (so any additional step in that process to make them think more increases their anger-o-meter?)

This is a great success story to use while trying to persuade those clients that don’t believe user testing can really deliver ROI. It illustrates so clearly that user research doesn’t just offer gains but stem what are essentially losses.