A client of mine shared with me an interesting article today. The title was The $300 Million Button. At first I thought it was another gimic like the Million Dollar Homepage.

To my pleasant surprise the article pointed out a very interesting revelation that a user interface engineer discovered; forcing customers to register/login creates a barrier to purchasing. Every single site I've ever written for ecommerce has done this, it's just the way it's always been done. After reading this article I realized that I had many of the same emotions as a purchaser that the article described:

"I'm not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something. Some first-time shoppers couldn't remember if it was their first time, becoming frustrated as each common email and password combination failed. We were surprised how much they resisted registering.

That is me, to a T.

The designer found that by removing this barrier, sales went up by $300,000,000, or 45%. That's a pretty impressive figure.

Full Article: The $300 Million Button

-Chris