Comments on: $300 Million Button: making customers create logins to buy cost etailer $300M/year

By: Comedian

Comedian — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:00:00 +0000

I think that this finding was likely made about McMaster Carr.

I haven’t, in my middling experience, come across any other web sellers of the scale that could potentially handle an additional 300 million dollars in sales.

I considered NewEgg, which I thought didn’t require an account creation, but a quick check shows that it too is in the relationship building business.

I suppose it could also be paypal in general, which I think will process CC payments without opening an account, but I don’t see that really being a “sale.”

By: redstarr

redstarr — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:48:00 +0000

I think the perfect happy medium for websites would be to offer an “opt in” option to create a relationship with the company, but with just zipping right to buying your item in privacy the clear default. There’s a handful of companies out there that I absolutely use frequently enough to want to make an account so that I can set up some filter preferences and not have to type my address over and over and actually might be interested in seeing notifications about when they have sales and such. Having a way to log in is really helpful on those sites. But there’s a lot of them that I don’t want or need that. Especially when I’m shopping for gifts for other people. Just because I bought one item one time for someone else doesn’t mean that I want a continued relationship at all with a site. Nothing they or their partners have to send me will be of any relevance at all to me. It won’t interest me or generate any revenue for them. It’s a waste of both our time.

I’m still receiving emails regularly from a site that I bought one cheap gift for a wedding shower from over a decade ago. I’m pretty sure no one ever purges their mailing list. If a “customer” hasn’t bought anything from you or logged on in the last couple of years, it’s time to take them off your list. That lead is no longer of much value.

By: redstarr

redstarr — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:34:00 +0000

Yep, Rob. I’m totally for blogs and such with comments that make it a wee bit tougher to comment. It helps keep spammers at bay a little bit and I think raises the level of the comments in general,too. If you had to create an account and log in to say something, you have to make a better effort than just seeing the site linked to somewhere and dropping by to post a quick “First” or “Meh” or an orientation slur. It doesn’t ward off the real motivated trolls and idiots, but it does at least weed out the really lazy ones.

By: Head Junky

Head Junky — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 07:54:00 +0000

KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid should be the foundation of your website.

By: Rob Beschizza

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 02:31:00 +0000

Let me put it this way: comments aren’t money, and our registration form is *intended* to create a hurdle. It works as expected.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:51:00 +0000

It must be a local phenomenon. The one here sells nothing but accessories for phones, stereos, TVs, computers, etc. Three quarters of the tiny store is devoted to cell phone displays.

By: Quibbler

Quibbler — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:11:00 +0000

I normally put in zz1 1zz a post code and it is always added to the address label.

I recently ordered from a large electronic company (allied) and they added INDIA at the end of my address (I live in the West Indies).

There are a lot of companies that will not accept credit cards that are issued by a West Indies banks which is another of my gripes as you have put your order got to the very last stage and it fails.

By: nnfdgnjdkfgnkjddfjkjhjkfghdfjk

nnfdgnjdkfgnkjddfjkjhjkfghdfjk — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:04:00 +0000

same goes for comment systems on blogs… oh wait, what the f was my username again?

By: cellocgw

cellocgw — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 16:55:00 +0000

You probably guessed it, but your credit history affects the rental rates they’ll offer you.

By: cellocgw

cellocgw — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 16:54:00 +0000

OK, then, name any, ANY other store within 50 miles of my home where I can get LEDs, 120VAC neon microlamps, RCA Y-connectors, BNC bulkhead male and female connectors, diodes, transistors, …. you get the idea. I know there are lots of great sites like widgets.com and monoprice.com , but every now and then I’d like to be able to buy < $10 worth of parts without having to deal w/ the time and cost of shipping.
So, RatShack may have its drawbacks, but it is the only hobbyist game in town.

By: cellocgw

cellocgw — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 16:48:00 +0000

You need to think a little. Pick the strong password of your choice, and then simply append the website’s URL to it. Say your password is %#$TEHF@%23/<* Then log into boingboing with %#$TEHF@%23/<*boingboing , and to amazon with %#$TEHF@%23/<*amazon , etc. That way you're really only using one strong password. The drawback is that if someone gets yr strong password AND knows your secret trick, you have to change them all. (I use a variant of this, using certain website data as a "keygen" for a portion of the password)

By: Frode Helland

Frode Helland — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:52:00 +0000

I’m about to launch a software webshop. How would you suggest one go about this with a license based product? What about support, redownloading your purchases, etc?

By: ROSSINDETROIT

ROSSINDETROIT — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 14:27:00 +0000

Hiya, Antinous. I was in a ratshak yesterday. They have lots of good stuff for hobbyist experimenters, though it’s a long way from their ’70s heyday. When I was developing my Squelette audio amp for Make Magazine I prepared a working prototype almost entirely from Ratshak parts. I had it at Maker Faire last year and Mark took a pic of it (scroll to bottom):
http://boingboing.net/2010/08/02/my-favorite-makers-a.html

By: Xof

Xof — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 23:32:00 +0000

Because Disqus makes one of the most loathsome jobs on the internet (comment administration and moderation) somewhat easier for the site owners.

By: Guest

Guest — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 23:15:00 +0000

Speaking of forced opt-ins, why is Discus suddenly the Godfather of comment threads?

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 23:05:00 +0000

Not that I want to undermine my job, but there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between page views, comment volume and ad revenue at BB. Comment page views are a tiny percentage of overall views.

By: Eric Hunt

Eric Hunt — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:52:00 +0000

Antinous – if you think about it, it’s not quite as opposite as you portray. The comments are what cause news and discussion sites to be sticky, and that stickiness is used to generate advertising revenue. BB has advertisers.I know BB isn’t like social media where our participation is the product being sold to advertisers, but you have to admit that it’s not crazy to think that removing barriers to quick comments might increase the ad revenue through increased participation.

By: librtee_dot_com

librtee_dot_com — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:13:00 +0000

Hey..thanks BB! Thinking about this issue, I added the excellent COWOA plugin to my zen cart store. It was kind of a PITA, but now my customers have an option of buying without creating an account.

I hope it increases my sales by $300 million, too :)

By: bocomo

bocomo — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 21:44:00 +0000

not much

i tried in vain to get some connector or adapter or something and went back home and ordered online and waited

By: bocomo

bocomo — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 21:33:00 +0000

Limbo is a GREAT game by the way

…although that process sounded like hell

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 21:00:00 +0000

Does RadioShack even carry anything but cell phones and accessories anymore?

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 20:55:00 +0000

Take note BoingBoing, you’ve just done exactly what you’re preaching against.

Yeah, they’re exactly, precisely identical experiences. Except for the part where the online retailer is trying to get you to give them money and we’re providing you with free entertainment and a free forum for your ramblings. But other than that, they’re exactly, precisely identical experiences.

By: jeb

jeb — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 20:46:00 +0000

jcpenney – try the drop down menus in Safari. That’s the latest one. Macy’s used to have this problem. I don’t know if it still exists on that site.

By: nosehat

nosehat — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 18:55:00 +0000

If they deliberately ignore their own opt-out, then it definitely is spam. They are spammers through and through, and deserve to be black-listed and auto-filtered.

By: Little John

Little John — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 18:07:00 +0000

12345 turns out to be Schenectady, New York.

But it doesn’t matter if Quibbler doesn’t live in New York or even the U.S. (“Where I live there are no zip/post codes”). If the postal service in, say, Mali (or wherever Quibbler lives) doesn’t have numeric post codes, then the 12345 (or Quibbler’s random entry) will probably be ignored by the sorters there.

The post code requirement is on a par with the presumably well-intentioned ignorance of requiring 5 or 9 digits for the post code outside the U.S., or disallowing alphabetic characters in the post code, or demanding 10-digit phone numbers or three-letter domains. This last is not as much of a problem these days, but some programmers apparently thought all TLDs were either .com, .gov., ,mil, etc., and so disallowed .co.uk, .name, .ca, etc.

By: Baldhead

Baldhead — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 16:29:00 +0000

I recall trying to rent a car and being asked for full details including credit card before I could find out prices at one site. Sorry folks but you do not need my credit card number until I have decided to pay for your services. Which will never happen if you don’t tell me your prices.

By: Tyler Karaszewski

Tyler Karaszewski — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 16:08:00 +0000

12345 turns out to be Schenectady, New York.

By: Quibbler

Quibbler — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 15:49:00 +0000

Where I live there are no zip/post codes and often this is a compulsory field. Fortunately just making up a random one often works.

By: John Delaney

John Delaney — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 15:33:00 +0000

With all this hacking ballyhoo going on, it seems like an easy fix to prevent people from hijacking accounts with a stolen password and buying old defenseless women packages of condoms and other rubbish is to not have a log in or an account at all.

Personally, I’m sick of having to remember passwords for everything and typing my credit card number in is probably about as fast. Isn’t there a better way?

By: Jeremy Mizell

Jeremy Mizell — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 14:57:00 +0000

Before I went freelance and worked as a webmaster for an online retailer, I tried to convince the owner that even offering the option for registration was little benefit to us. My argument was registration created too much of an obstacle and provided little benefit. Considering most of our customers where on average less then computer literate it caused a great deal of trouble. Our customer service spent far too much time resetting passwords for users who misspelled their email address, forgot their login email address, or shipped their order to the wrong shipping address because they forgot to update it during checkout. Registration isn’t necessary for a consumer to consent to joining our mailing list. So from our point of view, what’s the point?