Comments on: The Magic Buy Button is Just Smoke and Mirrors

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 06:02:08 +0000

Interesting observation the orange was chosen as it was part of our corporate color palette, blue and orange. We haven’t done any button testing on the blog but would be an interesting test!

By: Naz

Naz — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 13:18:58 +0000

But isn’t it ironic that this site uses an orange subscribe button? (but yes I agree with the premis of multiple split testing)

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:25:39 +0000

@Susan. Oh boy :-*

By: Susan Petracco

Susan Petracco — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:40:30 +0000

One of my customer recently hired a “landing page optimization” company, who told them to use a red or green add to cart button because those convert the best.

Talk about over-generalizing???

By: electronics_junkie

electronics_junkie — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:18:37 +0000

Match colors. Make it visible. Do research on color’s mental effects on people. Common sense will tell you that there are more factors involved in a person’s decision to buy than the color of your button. Also, if the button works for another site and not yours, there are factors of that site that affect the decision as well. It dosen’t matter how close of a match you and your competitor’s sites are. There might be a small dot in the top right corner that is affecting your page’s cleanness. Who knows.

By: Educational Toys

Educational Toys — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 03:18:12 +0000

That’s the problem with inexperienced and untested web design. So many factors come into play, into convincing customers to buy. So many people want to take A from Amazon, B from Ebay, C from their top competitor, D from Overstock, etc – and put them all onto their site. But each of those site doesn’t use those features together (otherwise the same company would just say “build me a site that looks like X”). You know?

By: Jon Jennings

Jon Jennings — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 01:20:22 +0000

Two things I found interesting…

1) if you Google “Don’t Waste Time and Lost Sales On Split Testing” you find only links to THIS blog – not the original source material.

2) the original source suggests one of those 5 background colors at the top of the page is a secret weapon for converting sales… but then it uses a different color for its own sales panel.

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:46:52 +0000

@jay

Thanks for stopping by the blog. I may have come across as snarky, but actually this product being sold does not imply that your results may vary. It’s not promoting testing, it’s selling test results.

I can’t read “Don’t Waste Time and Lost Sales On Split Testing – Simply Borrow My Results

Here’s the big idea. You don’t have to waste your time or money split testing. You don’t have to spend months and months before you go to market, or thousands of dollars in PPC advertising like we did to learn what really works. You can simply borrow my results.

I can almost guarantee you simply based on the large scientific numbers that we use to gather the results of these tests you could never gather this information even if you had 8 years and a million dollars to waste trying…”

…without getting a little pissed. Why? Because this is misleading.

Actually no, he is selling his results and claiming this will save you time and money on testing.

By: Jon Jennings

Jon Jennings — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:52:27 +0000

Haha! Linda, I’ve been reading your blog for long enough to recognize the error here from just the first paragraph and the video opening frame. Thanks for the ecommerce education.

Didn’t one of your interviewees talk about how Amazon tweaked their buy button and all his clients immediately phoned up frothing at the mouth and wanting the same new super button that Amazon had? …when it turned out Amazon had only tweaked it to allow them an extra line of text somewhere else on the page.

By: Arthur Clemens

Arthur Clemens — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:54:07 +0000

The video is pretty thin on evidence how they have conducted the test. If it is true they only tested those 3 other button variations, clearly the big orange button is the winner. Using split testing for this is just bad promotion.

We have recently tested a website that actually uses red buying buttons – conform the styleguide. The test persons did not have any problem with (or remark on) the red buttons. Of course, a usability test is different from quantitative testing, but the test did confirm the article’s conclusion that it all depends on context.