The $300 Million Button Change

Here’s how one?small change?in an e-commerce's checkout process resulted in an extra $300m in sales.

With their old checkout process customers were required to sign up to pay.

Their new checkout process allowed for customers to proceed to payment without signing up.

And it paid off..

After making the change the number of customers purchasing went up by 45% resulting in an extra $15 million in just 1 month!!

For the first year the site saw an additional $300 million in sales.

That’s a lot of zeroes...

Here's why they did it

The business thought that a sign in button would make it simpler for returning users to checkout. And for new users they probably wouldn’t mind the extra friction.

or so they thought… but turns out it was a costly assumption.

New and returning users hated being forced to sign up/in.?

From a new user's point of view this was just an unnecessary step - they didn't want to give out personal information.

For existing customers that forgot their password turning checking out into a series of head banging password attempts.

By simply replacing their signup button with a continue button, customers could get what they set out to do faster.

Here's the key takeaway

Make it simple for your users to achieve what they want to do - remove all friction and facilitate the process.

In the above case study their users just wanted to pay...

But a little friction in the process resulted in users closing the browser to never return.

And it's scary because a small mistake like this is something that could go unnoticed for a very long time.

That’s why it’s important to track what your users are doing - live session recording, heat maps, drop out rates, page views etc...

software like?Google Analytics?and?Hotjar?can be a real game changer in this case.?Setting this up will take less than 5 minutes!

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