On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, Greg London wrote: > Simon Wilcox said: > > I don't know any big name web sites that only expect to have one and only > > one transaction with a customer. Repeat business is what they want and in > > those cases they need to make the process as easy as possible so accounts > > are used to retain information between purchases. > > The company in question is the Print On Demand (POD) publisher I use > to make my perl book available. Most customers to a POD site go > there because they know the author (family, friend) and they will > only ever buy that one book.
Do they have any figures on the number of users abandoning carts before checkout and any idea of the reason why ? If this is the only place where the product can be bought, they may well have a low failure rate because people have to persevere if they want the product badly enough. My point being that there may be little incentive for them to invest in changing their system. > Repeat customers, if there are any, could set up an account that has > a single password for all their purchases. So a way to convert the one-shot tracking number into an account would work here. > So, setting up a book buying customer with all the account > information they need to become an author is, well, scammy. So they pass off their registered buyers as authors ? Seems like you might have a bigger problem ;-) > Getting rid of the password requirement is a minor help to > the overhead of making an online purchase compared to walking > into a store and paying cash. True, although in this case the book's not available in stores so the sole issue is whether, in *this* case, more books will be sold without a password than with one. > But getting rid of creating an account to buy one book > means that book-buyers are not registered as possible > authors for the company. It sounds like fixing this is your issue, not doing away with passwords. It is surely possible to have two account types. One for buying, one for selling ? > The idea would be to allow one-time buyers to purchase their book > without a password. But becoming an author would require setting up an > account/password. Or that the account they set up to buy is not counted as "author" material until they choose to do so. > So, part of the reasoning is technical, part of it is to > make purchases easier for one-time buyers, and part of it > is to improve the scammy/legitimatey measure of how the > POD company does business. The last one is where you need to be focussing. The rest is implmentation detail :-) > I made the suggestion to the company, and right now, all > I've gotten is that it is technically impossible to do it. > But they have incentive to turn book buyers into authors > because they make more money on an author than on a one-time > book buyer. So, they don't qualify as completely impartial. They are wrong. There are ways to do it but never mind that. What you need to do is convince them that there are better ways of doing business which will make them more money. Do you pay them money as an author or do they actually make money from selling the books ? The scammyness factor being high in that they're trying to say they have more authors than they really do in order to attract authors who really do want to sell books ? Surely the argument has to go along the lines that : a. They will be driving away aware authors who consider them to be scammy, thus losing sales to a different POD company. b. By only requesting as much information from customers as is actually required to handle the sale they will improve their conversion rate and sell more books. c. By not pretending to be what they're not, they'll attract more authors who will in turn sell more books. The answer to b may be passwordless purchase but it is probably a combination of a change of use of the data and a two tier solution to separate authors and buyers. Ultimately it's a business problem not a technical one. If they won't change how they use their data because they *want* to misrepresent themselves in some way then no technical solution will save them from themselves :-) > So, I wanted to get the technical answer from some folks > who have no incentive to put spin on things. And you folks > are my impartial expert witnesses. > > So, first I want to establish if it can be done or not. Yes it can but I don't think that's your fight. Please don't think I'm having a pop at you though. I'm the first to jump at a technology solution but I've learned that in situations like this, technology is rarely the solution to what is, in essence, a business problem. Simon. -- "Bambleweeny 57 Submeson Brain" _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
