[Guest post by Rounak Jain, an undergrad student at BITS Pilani, Goa. He talks about the issues with landing page of Group buying and deals sites from a user’s perspective. Reposted from his blog.]
Hey daily deal/group buying websites,
Why do you have to make it so hard for non registered users to navigate through the deals on your portal? I get that your user base is a very crucial stat in your slide decks when pitching to investors, but that doesn’t mean you force a user to register without even telling him or her what are they signing up for. Nor does it mean that when a user registers, you lock him/her into your service and not allow account deletion.
Take for instance Crazeal.com, Groupon India’s new avatar to get rid of its “sasta” image. When I visited the site for the first time, Crazeal showed me deals for what I’m guessing is the city closest to mine, but right when I’m ready to click on something your site pops up an alert prompting me to handover my email id to you.
That would have been fine if you would have clearly indicated that the email id is optional and not mandatory for a user to browse through your site.
Your alert has no close button, just a big sign up button with a text field and a link saying “Already Registered?”.
Let me tell you what was my (an unregistered user’s) thought process on seeing the alert. I clearly didn’t want to handover my email id to you (I’m already having a hard time deleting indiaplaza mailers), nor was I “Already Registered”, so the only option you left to me was close the tab and forget about your deals.
While writing this, to be sure of the accuracy of whatever I am writing I visited your site on different browsers and the alert did pop on all of them (only first time on each browser though). Out of my curiosity, I clicked on the “Already Registered?” link and guess what? It doesn’t bring up a sign in page, but simply fades the popup away!
Either your UX designers suck, or you have chosen to not put a straight forward close button. Either way, not a good experience for a non-registered or for that matter a non-logged in user.
Take another site, Fashion And You. I could rant about how unfit is that name for a site that sells mobile phones with clothes, but let’s move onto your main problem. I understand your use of Google Ads to acquire customers, in fact I got to know of your site through those ads and even clicked on the ad whose image I’ve embedded below:
What I expected was a page that summarized all the features of the phones in the ad along with attractive pricing, but what did I get? A bizzaire landing page which again prompted me to register or login. Have a look for yourself:
No way of getting me to the deal you lured me into clicking on without giving away my information.
What do you think, a user would sign up blindly without even knowing the quality and the value of your deals?
Take on the other hand Flipkart.com, a site which is not entirely similar to yours, but it does sell products online. Let alone browsing through Flipkart’s catalogue, you can even order a product from their site, without signing up. I’m pretty sure there are other sites like that as well.
So please think over what you present to a user as a user and not as the people behind the sites.
