The 300 Million Dollar Button
	Gareth Sales Thursday, July 19, 2012

Hi everyone,

I recently stumbled across an article which was published a few years ago titled ‘The $300 Million Button’. It tells the tale of how one simple change to a form on a major ecommerce site increased their revenue by $300,000,000 a year.

The form was straight forward, it had two fields – ‘email address’ and ‘password’, two buttons – ‘login’ and ‘register’ and a ‘forgot password’ link - a standard form that most people are familiar with. However it wasn’t the form itself that was causing problems, it was the fact that this form appeared after a customer had filled their shopping cart with products and was ready to pay.

The form was designed in this way to enable repeat customers to log in and make their purchase faster and they assumed first time buyers wouldn’t mind registering because it would allow them to checkout faster in the future.

That’s where they were massively wrong, usability tests were conducted and the overwhelming response from first time buyers was "we are just here to buy something, we don’t want to enter into a relationship”.

The form wasn’t popular with repeat customers either, often they couldn’t remember which email/password combination they had registered and had to go through the ‘forgot password’ process.

The $300,000,000 change
To fix this issue, the designers simply replaced the ‘Register’ button with a ‘Continue’ button, next to the continue button was a message that said "You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout."

As a result of this change, there was a 45% increase in the number of customers completing their purchase – resulting in an additional $300,000,000 in revenue in a year.

How to do the same for your VP-ASP store
You can enable a guest checkout feature on your VP-ASP store with our One Page Checkout module. Not only does this feature allow your customers to check out without registering, it also streamlines the checkout process by allowing the customer to enter all of their information on a single page.

You can see the module in action here - http://onepage.cartmonkey.com/

How do I get One Page Checkout?
The One Page Checkout module is available as a free inclusion with our Premium Business Ready Plan or as a custom install for VP-ASP version 7.0 users, please contact us for a quote if you are interested in installing One Page Checkout in your existing store.

One Page Checkout will be available as an add-on for VP-ASP version 8.0.

Happy Selling!

Gareth