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How Changing a Button Increased Sales By $300 Million
By Anna Johnson on November 10th, 2009Website usability expert Luke Wroblewski has written a great article explaining how changing a single button – yes, a button – led one online store to increase its per annum sales by $300 million.
I encourage you to read Luke’s article (link below) for a number of reasons – to see just how critical certain webpage elements are to your conversions, sales and income, but also to reassure you that even the biggest, most experienced websites can get it wrong.
We ALL make mistakes. And if you think you are leaving – or have left – money on the table because of a dumb mistake or two… how about leaving $300 million on the table? All because of some little button on a webpage?
Firstly, let’s agree that some ‘minor’ items – such as buttons on a webpage – are not minor at all. Indeed, out of all the components of a sales page, the buttons you want visitors and customers to click on are among the most important.
Simply put, buttons can have a huge impact on conversions and sales. How they look, where they are located, when and how they are presented during a transaction, etc will all affect the extent to which they are clicked.
In Luke Wroblewski’s case, he was working on the website of a major online retailer when he discovered that the order form used by customers – a form consisting of two fields, two buttons and one link – was inhibiting people from buying. So much so that it was costing the ecommerce store some $300 million in sales each year.
To be clear, we’re not talking about people who were browsing the website – we’re talking about customers who placing orders for goods… and then abandoning their shopping carts because of the order form.
So what was the problem?
The form itself consisted of two fields – ‘Email Address’ and ‘Password’ – two buttons – ‘Login’ and ‘Register – and one link, ‘Forgot Password’. The problem wasn’t so much with the content of the form as its location, or more correctly, it’s appearance in the shopping sequence. Customers would encounter the form after they’d selected their products and clicked ‘Checkout’ but before they could enter their payment information.
Apparently, the idea behind this sequencing was to enable previous customers to login and complete their purchase more quickly, whilst enticing new customers to register with the site so they could complete purchases more quickly in the future.
However, Luke’s usability tests revealed that the online retailer had totally misunderstood the mentality of both its first time and repeat shoppers.
First time shoppers just wanted to make a purchase; they did not want to enter into relationship with the retailer, as the requirement to register with the site suggested. Repeat customers tended not to remember their login information, so they were just frustrated by the form.
All in all, the form became a huge obstacle to people wanting to complete their purchases. So much so, that nearly half of them – along with their $300 million worth of items – simply abandoned their orders and didn’t buy at all.
When Luke and the team identified the problem and modified the form so that people had the OPTION of either registering or simply proceeding to the checkout, the number of customers who completed purchases on the site rose by 45 percent and, in the next 12 months, sales grew by $300 million.
Now, that’s the power of testing, understanding your customers… and a button!
Source: Jared M. Spool, “The $300 Million Button,” User Interface Engineering, January 14, 2009
