[HN Gopher] Don't force users to register before they can buy (2...
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Don't force users to register before they can buy (2015)
Author : acqbu
Score : 111 points
Date : 2022-12-22 20:35 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nngroup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nngroup.com)
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I tend to abandon prospective purchases if I'm forced to make an
| account.
|
| If it's something I really need and can't get anywhere else (and
| if I don't intend to have a protracted business relationship with
| the seller) I usually sign up with snarky addresses (that I still
| receive) like: SellerDomain-I-hate-that-you-make-me-
| register@mydomain.com
|
| Not only can I easily squelch all future email from the seller
| but there's at least a remote chance somebody will recognize my
| ire and think about their process.
| switchbak wrote:
| I too will abandon a purchasing quest if they force that crap
| on me. Doubly so for all those small time sites that make me
| then log in or add something to my cart just to see a price.
|
| I don't understand how this behaviour can persist when it's
| customer repellant. (Unless they're optimizing for a different
| captive market, and really aren't interested in my business).
| crookedview wrote:
| Sometimes, at least, the 'add to cart for price' is done
| because the manufacturer or distributor of products will
| forbid retailers from advertising lower prices on their site.
| When I worked in an industry that had these policies
| enforced, the reasoning we were given was that the policy was
| in place to maintain healthy competition between retailers
| selling the same products.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Sometimes the "add to cart to see price" means you're getting
| a good price - the manufacturer set a minimum price and
| they're going below, and they don't want it to show up in
| searches.
| crooked-v wrote:
| That's also why the Costco website has lots of "sign in to
| see the price" pages.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I mean, Costco is already members-only anyhow
| vikingerik wrote:
| It's repellant for signups, but it's positive that once a
| customer does sign up, you keep marketing to them for long-
| term value and future purchases.
|
| The other answer is you optimize for what you can measure.
| It's hard to know when users are dropping off at the account-
| signup wall; it's easy to know when an existing user bites on
| your re-marketing efforts.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| * * *
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm happy that most utility companies don't force me to open an
| online account to pay. They have a "guest pay" feature. Much
| appreciated.
|
| I also hate websites where they hide your password while typing
| it in. Who can enter a password like Xaa3$#%^&*JqUIx correctly
| while blind? "Three attempts and your account is locked out!"
|
| AAAGGGHHHHH.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| I grew into a habit of writing it to a notepad and copy/pasting
| if I needed to type a really complicated long password.
| BrianHenryIE wrote:
| A related bad UX is forcing users who do have accounts to log in
| to complete their purchase. I wrote a couple of
| WordPress/WooCommerce plugins to smooth this out - by prompting
| for login if an account exists matching the email address, and by
| adding single use passwords to emails sent from the site, so
| users who visit the site are already logged in when they arrive:
|
| * https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/bh-wp-account-and-login-ux
|
| * https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/bh-wp-autologin-urls
| Spooky23 wrote:
| A friend consulted at a DMV years ago and improved their online
| transaction conversions a lot by dropping the login requirement
| for things like registrations.
|
| Nobody wakes up and decides to pay someone else's car tax. And
| if they do, if the money is good, who cares?
|
| The other thing is the need for an account at all. With a lot
| of online merchants, I don't want an ongoing relationship. Take
| your cash and leave me alone.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > Nobody wakes up and decides to pay someone else's car tax.
|
| Or they do, because they woke up to a car from a parent who
| isn't doing this newfangled internet thing but would like the
| car tax paid.
| colpabar wrote:
| Don't force me to do anything. Don't force me to make an account,
| don't force me to uncheck a box to say I don't want you to send
| me spam, don't tack on "extras" like a youtube subscription that
| I have to notice and unselect. Let me add stuff to a cart, and
| then let me pay for it. Don't even ask me to make an account on
| your site until I have fully completed my purchase, and don't try
| to trick me into thinking I need one.
|
| The thing about making an account that is so annoying is that I
| already need at least two accounts to buy something online,
| usually. I need some kind of account that lets me pay for things,
| like a credit card or paypal. I then also need an email account
| to check out, usually.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Yes. Buying things online has made me realize why friction is so
| bad. If someone wants to buy, don't waste their time. Let them
| give you money.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| There was a recent hackernews[1] post that talked about how
| great McMaster is. It seems that for consumer retail
| businesses, a purchase is just one of many many ways the
| business wants to suck more value out of you. Upselling and
| giving the marketing team something to do are a priority. It's
| gross.
|
| The dark patterns have been designed and A-B tested. They must
| have shown to increase in shareholder value, unfortunately,
| likely in the short term.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Sometime the increase is imaginary, driven by the "good"
| parts being easily measurable while the "bad" parts (loss of
| trust, abandoned carts) are not measurable, harder to measure
| and/or not being measured.
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| Anything in the way is a conversion fail and leaving money on the
| table.
|
| And for heck's sake, automatically associate previous guest
| transactions with a new account when a user finally decides to
| take the plunge.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I want to see the actual conversion statistics. Oftentimes these
| kinds of patterns emerge because they work, regardless of what
| people say.
| thecodemonkey wrote:
| While not strictly e-commerce. This was an important design
| choice when we designed our spreadsheet upload tool for Geocodio.
|
| It should be possible to go through as much of the process as
| possible without having to sign up first.
|
| It certainly makes it technically more difficult to develop, but
| it's incredibly powerful and user friendly.
| gnicholas wrote:
| We've done the same thing with our Chrome extension. Someone
| can access our 2 week free trial without so much as entering an
| email address. We do this partly so it can be easily tried out
| by young students, partly because it makes things nicer for all
| users, and partly because it reduces customer support and
| refund requests.
|
| The downside is that we can't put folks in an e-mail drip
| campaign, which would help us educate our users and increase
| our conversion rate. But we hate spam, so we don't view not-
| spamming as much of a downside.
| nottorp wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there was one product i abandoned in spite of
| it being somewhat useful - all because they started to send
| me tips and tricks emails after i signed up.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I can't tell you how many times I've done a guest checkout, then
| come back to register and my order doesn't show up in the
| history, even if the email matches. Now I make sure to try to
| register first as it's such a broken experience in too many
| places if you don't.
| dukoid wrote:
| Samsung in particular advertises account registration after
| guest checkout with "register to track your order" -- and then
| it doesn't work.
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| One of the dumbest anti-patterns. Even major shopping cart
| frameworks have this problem such as spree and activemerchant.
|
| The one who gets this mostly right is Shopify. They're the
| "Stripe" of shopping carts.
| gboss wrote:
| It's generally not done because it's a security issue as an
| attacker could register before you with your email and gain
| access to your personal info (billing and shipping address and
| maybe last four of credit card). What would be best if the
| eCommerce site would send you an email to confirm your email
| address to unlock your guest checkout orders. That's a fairly
| complicated flow for most eCommerce outfits so I think they
| just default to not show guest orders.
| suprjami wrote:
| The 2022 version is not to nag users with a registration flyover
| for your blog post, the instant the user visits and hasn't even
| read the first sentence.
|
| I won't visit Medium or Substack blogs at all because of this
| awful pattern.
| cyberphobe wrote:
| I used to refuse to use those services, but then I got
| libredirect [1] which does a great job of decrapifying them and
| a lot of other anti-user websites.
|
| [1] https://libredirect.codeberg.page
|
| EDIT: I will still attempt to avoid your shitty substack/medium
| blog if literally any other sources are available. Please stop
| using this garbage.
| agluszak wrote:
| Lol, we posted it exactly the same instant
| agluszak wrote:
| LibRedirect[1] makes these blogs (and other parts of internet)
| more bearable.
|
| [1] https://libredirect.github.io/
| Ensorceled wrote:
| On the flip side, people literally go through these kinds of
| expedited transaction processes and use _my_ email address, so I
| get receipts, requests to create accounts, "review the product"
| emails, etc.
|
| Please validate emails OR let me click on a "that wasn't me"
| link.
|
| If not, I will flag your email, and company, as spam.
| alias_neo wrote:
| I went into a sofa store in the UK a few years ago and gave
| them some details like my email address for a potential
| purchase which they input into a tablet.
|
| Some time later, I started receiving emails about my sofa
| purchase, addressed nice and personally to "Paul" (not my name)
| and then some time after that, emails about my "finance
| agreement".
|
| It was all legit, except for the fact that none of it was
| intended for me. Someone had been in to the store after me, and
| somehow they'd entered my email address on this guys form, he's
| never had any of his documents about his finance agreement, or
| when his sofa was going to be delivered, etc, because I had it
| all.
|
| Hope the guy got his sofa in the end, but company made it
| almost impossible for me to tell them they were sending all
| this stuff to the wrong email, in the end I just blocked them.
| suprjami wrote:
| I am aware of 4 other people who share my name, one of them has
| an email address one character off from mine.
|
| I've followed their life from their employment offer, maternity
| leave plans, childbirth hospital trip, baby photos, pet
| purchases, school registration, and recently their child is
| registered in a gifted student program. I'm almost part of the
| family!
| genewitch wrote:
| at that point (and probably about 10 years ago) i'd have made
| a different email address on a domain name i own.
|
| gmail, for instance, shows off how awful google is if you
| stop relying on it but open it fairly often. I don't think
| i've received any non-automated emails on my gmail account in
| over a year, but now all of the tabs are chock full of junk,
| aliexpress, spam, aliexpress, scams, aliexpress...
|
| I lucked out on fastmail grandfathering me in to the $5/yr
| plan that allows you a single MX domain endpoint, so i have
| any-email-i-want@mydom.ain for around $20/year including
| taxes, DNS, and domain registration.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Is that you Foo?
|
| See https://www.bar.com/ for reference.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| Why do people use your email address?
| [deleted]
| pwg wrote:
| And my related pet-peeve, entry of credit card number comes
| before display of shipping and handling charges for the order.
| I've abandoned carts at sites that did not provide S/H before
| they wanted my credit card number.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| If we are complaining about credit cards, mine is the _large_
| number of sites that ask for credit card details out of order.
| Number, then name, then zip code, maybe month /year or some
| equally cursed implementation. Even better if tabbing between
| fields is equally random.
|
| Have these designers never looked at their own credit card
| before? Or is there just an incredible desire to be different
| that they require a unique take for this already solved
| problem?
| zeta0134 wrote:
| I wonder how many of these are intentionally randomizing the
| form you get during checkout, in an effort to thwart
| automated purchases by bot accounts. I don't know anything
| about this space, but I've definitely noticed that my bank
| does this with its login flow. There's at least a dozen
| variations and domains I might get redirected to on any given
| day. Does anyone who works in this space know of a similar
| practice for online checkout?
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I'll add to that: always tell customer up front if there is
| stock or if back-ordered. Burned too many times by the silent
| back-order.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Wow, I feel like I buy a lot of stuff online but I don't think
| I've ever come across that. It sounds super bad.
|
| Is there a particular site or commerce platform that is known
| for implementing this?
| RajT88 wrote:
| Those drop-shipper websites which are extremely numerous (and
| often haven't been running for very long) are quite guilty of
| this.
|
| They sometimes use this as a way of "bait and switch" - we're
| sorry, we're out of stock, but if you want to use the credit
| for this item on other things...
| netsharc wrote:
| Tried to book a flight a week ago. One site was showing the
| price 30% less than other sites. Last step, entered my CC info
| and clicked "Purchase". "Oops, the flight is no longer
| available for that price, current price: x (the price other
| sites were showing). Do you want to buy anyway?". To be fair,
| the dialog with the "Buy anyway" and "Cancel" buttons weren't
| using any further dark patterns.
|
| No, I would not like to buy anyway, but to welcome to you to
| the list od websites I'll never use again, [redacted].com...
| amalcon wrote:
| That looks to be a classic bait-and-switch, which is
| considered a form of fraudulent advertising in many
| jurisdictions. It may not be worth the hassle for you, but
| you probably could report them if you want.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Probably depends on whether the entity baiting you is the
| same as (or represents) the entity you're ultimately
| purchasing from. If the aggregator is merely redirecting
| you to the airline and getting a kickback, as opposed to
| actually being a middleman, maybe that's a loophole in
| bait-and-switch law?
|
| On the other hand, since GP furnished payment details to
| the baiter, I guess it really is a middleman, in which case
| you're absolutely correct.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That sucks, but to be fair that's not usually intentional,
| but simply a cached price that hasn't updated. You see this
| especially with flights for some reason due to the complexity
| -- airlines change prices incredibly frequently but
| aggregator sites can't refresh them all instantly. I'd
| forgive a site if I only saw this happen once/occasionally,
| but I'd report it to regulators if I saw it happen as a
| pattern.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Not updating the cache before/when asking for CC
| information is at the very least knowingly ignoring the
| problem, and likely intentionally ignoring the problem
| because the user is more likely to continue anyway once
| you've tricked them into giving their CC information and
| they just need to click yes to be done...
|
| I hope jurisdictions that have "truth in advertising" laws
| bring the hammer down on such "negligent" violations.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| With how laggy those sites are, I figured they are indeed
| pulling the price from the origin... Interesting that
| they'd have their own cache and still be so slow.
| Marazan wrote:
| Unfortunately the airline industry is both filled with caches
| upon caches upon caches when it comes to prices and also
| deceptive dark patterns.
|
| The dark patterns have got better over time (as meta-search
| like Skyscanner and Kayak drive so much traffic to sites and
| demand honest pricing - travel agents either have to clean up
| their act or forgo meta search traffic) but the many, many
| layers of caches remain.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I find it especially creepy when I start checking out as a guest,
| decide not to proceed (often due to usurious "shipping and
| handling" charges), and then get an email about my abandoned
| cart.
|
| I get why companies do this, but IMO if I enter my email address
| and have not given permission for it to be used except for a
| given transaction, then it shouldn't be used at all if the
| transaction isn't ratified.
|
| It's one step removed from tracking character input in a text box
| and capturing an email address that was subsequently deleted
| prior to submitting a form.
| lmm wrote:
| If you're in the EU, GDPR provides you with a mechanism to go
| after companies that do this, although the details for how you
| do that will be country-specific.
| philote wrote:
| If you think that's bad, I worked at a company that didn't
| always need your email address. Their customer sites would add
| their third-party cookie, so if you enter your email on any of
| their customer sites they could send you a cart abandonment
| email (I don't think you even had to SUBMIT your email, as it
| would be sent to the server as soon as it looked like a valid
| email). Fortunately I quit working for them once they started
| going down that evil route.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| From design standpoint, how do we design for user-related
| interactions though, like tracking /reviewing the purchase,
| informing when some error / failure happen in the middle,
| purchase receipt etc?
| bell-cot wrote:
| Thank you for your order, Guest!
|
| Your Order Number is 123456789
|
| Your Order PIN is 12345
|
| With your Order Number _and_ Order PIN, you can review or track
| your order >HERE<.
|
| Please note that we have no way to reach you if any problem
| occurs with your order, _unless you review your order_.
|
| Click >HERE< for a printable receipt. (It will NOT show your
| PIN.)
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The user probably provided an e-mail address. Tracking link
| goes there.
| scoofy wrote:
| As someone who started a wiki... yea... people _really_ don 't
| want to make accounts. The second I started letting people just
| edit things without being logged in, the wiki immediately became
| dramatically more useful to everyone. I was worried about
| vandalism, but it's really not an issue exactly because nobody
| actually cares about the site at all.
|
| It's a golf wiki if anyone is curious: https://golfcourse.wiki
| willchis wrote:
| This is cool! Just added my local course.
| MinaMe wrote:
| [flagged]
| zouhair wrote:
| I stopped counting the times I abandoned a purchase for this same
| reason.
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