Kristen, one advantage of having an account is after you sign in, you do not have to enter all your info for the order, it does save time but do understand trying to make you create an account before you even whip out your credit card.

In other words, if I’m a repeat customer: DON’T force me to log in to your site! If you can’t match up my records in email address/name/mailing address, you don’t deserve to have customers.

Giving access to what they’ll have to register for temporarily is a great idea.

I agree that the level of quality when it comes to checkout is not that great. I think though that security and quality of processing has been done pretty well in general.

Some points lacking, but not lacking enough to “stop” people from buying. Maybe discouraging.

Optimize!

Besides who can remember all those passwords, nothing worst than going to a site and not remembering your user name and password and then spending more time trying to get it from the site when it was quicker to just submit your order information without having the system try and remember it for you to start with.

I could live with that logic if I knew that a retailer’s store was fully optimized. However, there is rarely a chance that when we work with a retailer with a good team to execute that we don’t nudge up that conversion rate. In fact, a recent jewelry retailer went from that 3% mark to the 7% mark in the course of a 3 month engagement.

For example what’s the ratio of people who look in a shop window compared to people who actually walk in the door?

What’s the ratio of people who walk through the door compared to those that actually make a purchase?

If we had those figures from the real world then maybe our online 3% might not look so bad after all.

Stuart

You’ve got to “sell the free” and establish credibility and trust upfront. A bit more work, but it’s worth it.

A colleague and I have conducted usability sessions with a large UK multi-channel retailer, and early indications show that (and the caveat is that usability is qualitative rather than quantative) users prefer to choose up-front whether they are going to register or just checkout. A lot of people, in our sample, felt uncomfortable with the idea of not knowing whether or not they had ‘registered’. What this means, in my view, is that we have trained users to expect some form of registration at the beginning of the process and that if we fail to tell them – at the beginning – what we expect then FUD (Fear, Uncertainity and Doubt) will prevail and our users will not reward us with either a registration or an order.

Dan Croxen-John

Congrats on the new blog it looks great. I already forwarded it to a few friends.

Bryan

Customers have to want to give you their information. According to a survey from KnowledgeStorm and MarketingSherpa, 20% of people in the technology industry will not register for a white paper. If you’re early in the buying cycle, 20% is a very large percentage to exclude from your sales funnel.

My company, Studio B (www.studiob.com), has created several hundred white papers for large technology companies and I find it amazing how some of the companies focus on obtaining the lead rather than how persuasiveness of the white paper. If you focus on providing a highly persuasive message along with a thoughtful reward for providing the contact info, you’ll have a much higher quality lead and probably more of them.

I’ve just started a blog called KosherMarketing.com, which focuses on building meaningful relationships with customers. As tempting as it was, I chose not to make people register for the white paper that describes Kosher Marketing. Instead, I rewrote the white paper six times, and offered a free eBook as an incentive for voluntarily registering at the end of the white paper. So far, the results have been pretty astonishing.

I just wanna buy stuff! Why do online retailers have to make it so onerous? I realize that I’ll have to provide a bunch of information anyway (how else will I get my shipment and tracking info). Make it quick and easy and I’ll keep coming back.