The $300 million button

The form, intended to make shopping easier, turned out to only help a small percentage of the customers who encountered it. (Even many of those customers weren’t helped, since it took just as much effort to update any incorrect information, such as changed addresses or new credit cards.) Instead, the form just prevented sales — a lot of sales.

Sometimes all you need is a little text change to save your business a lot of money. Jared Spool once helped a “major ecommerce site” (very possibly Best Buy) with their checkout process. The company ended up changing the text of a submit button and making the company an additional $300 million in one year.

Similarly, in 2008, 37signals changed how they labelled charges on credit card statements and reduced chargebacks by 30%.