Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

Acting on Spool’s advice, the site’s designers fixed the problem simply – they replaced the ‘Register’ button with a ‘Continue’ button and a single sentence: ‘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.’ The number of customers completing purchases increased by 45 per cent almost immediately, which resulted in an extra $15 million in the first month; in the first year, the site saw an additional $300 million attributable simply to this change. So, people hate registering, and you can increase sales spectacularly by allowing them to bypass registration? Well, it’s not quite that straightforward – there’s a stranger aspect to this story, which is that most of the site’s customers (90 per cent or so) who chose to ‘continue as guest’ were subsequently happy to register as customers once they had made their purchase – the very people who had baulked at registering before completing the purchase were only too happy to leave their details and create an account at the end of the process. This shows that what mattered was not the actions we asked them to perform, but the order in which they were asked to make them. Typing your address in order to confirm where your new washing machine should be delivered feels like a good use of your time; performing the same task when all you seem to be doing is adding your details to a custome...