I just finished a meeting with a new friend who runs a fairly large business which provides promotional products to businesses of all kinds. This could include tee-shirt silk screening, custom hats, mugs, plagues, trinkets for tradeshow give-a-ways etc. Say you’re a general manager at a Mercedes dealer and you want to give away 500 [...]
I’ve been doing the interface for an internal software project called ImageKind that we’ve been focused on over at Curious Office. The last few days, we’ve been developing a shopping cart from scratch because we want it to look and function exactly according to our specifications. One thing we debated was whether or not we would let people buy products without creating an account of any kind. For example, on www.art.com you can add a product to your cart and get all the way through the checkout process without actually providing a username and password. On other sites like Cafe Press you must eventually enter a password as a new customer although you do it at the very end of a bunch of other form filling (e.g. address, email etc) so you aren’t really realizing that you are creating an account by the time you enter (and confirm) your password. I debated how we would approach this for several hours. First, I thought that the goal should be to let people give you money via the lowest possible set of hurdles and that appeared to suggest that a username and password should be optional but not required. Then I realized that most of the work to purchase products is in fact entering mandatory information in the first place such as shipping address, billing address and credit card info. The extra few seconds to enter your email address once (as your username) and your new password twice (once and then again to confirm) is the easiest part! That bit takes about 8 seconds. Yet, once you do it, you get to skip having to enter all that other information next time you come back to the site. To me, that sounds like a reasonable trade off. But, users need to understand all these benefits of having an account. It isn’t immediately obvious. How about order tracking? Stored data. Address books. All that in exchange for an extra 8 seconds to provide a password. In our case, we’re requiring an email as username and password for those who want to make a purchase. I think it’s the right choice.
…so there’s this site that I follow pretty regularly called PaidContent.org. If you work (or have worked as in my case) in the digital media industry then this is a URL that is no stranger to your daily web surfing ritual. Last night Rafat and crew made a pass through Seattle and had a great little party which was largely sponsored by thePlatform – a company I merged with some time ago now and with whom my wife still works. I have to say this was a great time and it felt a bit “1999″ in terms of the energy, exuberance and optimism that hung in the air. In some ways it felt like a RealNetworks reunion party too because there were so many old faces I hadn’t seen in a very long time. In any case, I have to say that every single person I talked to said they were working so hard that there weren’t enough hours in the day to deal with all the opportunity. Indeed, I do believe we are witnessing a new wave in internet growth and innovation. Nobody complained and told me how tough times were. Not one person said that corporate checkbooks were held tightly or that buying processes were unordinarily slow. Whether the attendees were from the mobile sector (a lot were), media, software, consulting or even hardware…all agreed that life was good. Some even said we’re in a bubble!
I say, relish it and have fun. One thing that I really enjoy is hearing how well old friends are doing. George Kliavkoff over at Major League Baseball.com is now EVP pretty much in charge of all things deal related. VERY old Real alum Phil Yerkes announced he left the company yesterday to work on a wireless play and Jeff Schrock continues to carry the torch at Real and is liked by all. All my old friends are busy and we don’t get a chance to catch up near enough but I get a kick out of watching all my friends do well, move up, get promoted and succeed. The best part is, I can see they are enjoying it too. How great is that?