The $300 Million Button

By default, Miva Merchant checkout has "Create New Account," "Place Order Without Account," and "Login to Existing Account" options. Users have been debating the best options to offer for a decade. I have had the opinion that asking a customer if they want to create an account during the checkout process is a high-level decision that distracts them from doing what you want, which is to give you money. Unless you are using Price Groups, Availability Groups, or membership benefits, I suggest simply eliminating the entire account functionality and let people enter their address each time they check out. It's really not that difficult.

At last, my view has been vindicated with this excellent study, followed by a couple free tutorials about how to make changes in your Miva Merchant 5.5 store:

How Changing a Button Increased a Site's Annual Revenues by $300 Million

It's hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.

Article Continued: http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button

To remove the Account options completely, view this tutorial.

To move the Create an Account option to the Invoice page, view this tutorial (with code).

For more information about Basic (free), Intermediate and Advanced tutorials, go to MerchantTutorials.com.

NOTE: Thanks to Viking Coders for their reference to this article in their blog.