UIEtips: The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question

A few weeks back, I wrote about how changing a button increased a major e-commerce site’s revenue by $300 million dollars.

The article quickly became one of the most popular articles we’ve ever published. People love the fact that a small design change could be linked to a huge increase in revenues. It’s the ultimate ROI story.

Yet in our research at User Interface Engineering, we see these kinds of increases all the time. And $300 million isn’t anywhere close to the biggest.

In today’s article, The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question, I talk about a design element whose income contribution is possibly 10 times larger. It’s a simple question on the Amazon site – one you’ve probably seen a thousand times – yet it is critical to the success of the business.

Unlike the previous story, where we worked on the project, this story comes from our research of Amazon, independent of any projects we’ve done for them. Therefore, our revenue projections are estimates this time. But even if we’re off by an order of magnitude, it’s still an impressive number that tells us how a well-thought-out design can make a big difference.

Increasing the effectiveness of a design is exactly what we’re talking about at the UIE Web App Summit, in Newport Beach, CA, April 19-22. Not signed up yet? Register now!

Have you had any design changes that had a big impact on your organization’s bottom line? We’d love to hear your stories. Share you thoughts below.