Does Your Website Have A £300 Million Button?
March 9, 2018
No one likes bad websites. If you can’t find the information you’re looking for in a nano second, you’ll simply click away and find it somewhere else. Your website is great: all the information a potential customer needs is right there at their fingertips, with no need to click onto a competitor’s site.
But what if I told you that just by adding one button to your website, you could potentially create a rich stream of vendors, keeping you busy with valuations for evermore?
Let me tell you the story of the $300 million button.
It began when a major retail website, let’s call it eSell, discovered they were getting a lot of abandoned shopping carts. This is when a customer clicks to buy, but doesn’t complete the transaction. eSell approached a web developer to help them fix the problem. At first glance, eSell’s checkout looked great; nice and simple; but it had one step that customers just didn’t like – the login. Right before they could pay for their purchases, eSell had a login page requiring the customer to enter their email address and password. You wouldn’t think this was such an issue, would you? After all, lots of websites ask you to login before you buy.
The web developer set up tests and watched what people actually did. Their reluctance to fill out these fields surprised him. When asked why she had abandoned her cart, one shopper told him, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”
The developer discovered that new customers were worried about giving their details, in case their inbox was bombarded with marketing messages. If a returning customers forgot their password, it was just too much trouble to retrieve it. The result? Thousands of abandoned shopping carts. And millions of dollars lost.
The developer knew what to do immediately. He changed the Register button for a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”
The results were instant and mind-blowing: the number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000 million. All for the change of a button
Where’s your £300 million button?
Your website is different; you’re not selling anything. You don’t have to worry about failed transactions and abandoned shopping carts. What you do need to worry about, is invisible customers. These are visitors who drift through your site, clicking here and there, but disappearing without you ever knowing who they are. It’s like having a fishing net with big holes in it. Your fish are simply swimming away. You need something tasty in the net to grab their attention, and tempt them to stay for long enough to at least identify themselves.
Look at your website. Is there anywhere a potential customer can give you their name and email address, and have you given them a reason to do that? You may have a Register for updates area, but isn’t that just for purchasers and tenants, so you can send them the latest listings? Think about whose details you actually want: vendors and landlords. Yes, you probably have a Book a Valuation form, but I bet you don’t get any enquiries. They just aren’t ready to take that step.
Look at my site for sellers: you’ll see that in exchange for an email address, I give away my Selling Secrets. In this way, my list of vendors grows by hundreds each year. In fact, if I were an estate agent, I would probably have no need to canvas or advertise for new vendors. My list would be enough. What would a button like that be worth to you?
What to do next: Do you get my Supertips? They’re jam-packed full of great tips and marketing strategies just like this one, and best still – they’re free! Get yours here -> www.samashdown.co.uk/samsupertips
Speak to Sam: If you’d like to know how I think you could improve your marketing, just answer a few short questions here and I’ll tell you if and how you could be more effective.
You May Also Enjoy
5 Practical Examples: This is How AI is Changing Real Estate
There does not appear to be a single industry that is likely to be immune from the impact of AI. Therefore, it is no surprise to learn that seismic changes are happening in the world of real estate, thanks to the increasing influence of artificial intelligence. From using the technology to identify ways to save…
Read More 
Overheating moves up the housing agenda
441,000 rental homes fail thermal comfort standards The latest analysis from Inventory Base has found that an estimated 441,000 private rented homes in England failed thermal comfort standards in 2024, accounting for 40.3% of all non-decent private rental properties, as major reforms to the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) came into force on…
Read More 
Annual house price growth slows in June
The latest Nationwide House Price Index for June 2026 shows that: House prices fell by -0.0% between May 2026 and June 2026. Annual house price growth increased to 2.2% in June 2026, up from 1.7% in May 2026. The average UK house price for June 2026 now stands at £277,484, down slightly from £278,024 in…
Read More 
Nationwide House Price Index May 2026
UK annual house price growth picked up to 3.0% in April, from 2.2% in March House prices were up 0.4% month on month Headlines Apr-26 Mar-26 Monthly Index* 554.8 552.7 Monthly Change* 0.4% 0.9% Annual Change 3.0% 2.2% Average Price (not seasonally adjusted) £278,880 £277,186 * Seasonally adjusted figure (note that monthly % changes are…
Read More 
Breaking Property News 1/7/26
Daily bite-sized proptech and property news in partnership with Proptech-X. Construction entrepreneur and TrueNorth Capital Group founder has a ten point plan for the next Prime Minister Mr Bradley Lay wants Andy Burnham, or whoever becomes the UK’s next Prime Minister, to overhaul the policies which are holding Britain’s construction sector back. And to…
Read More
Breaking Property News 30/6/26
Daily bite-sized proptech and property news in partnership with Proptech-X. 8% of commercial real estate investors and owners have started AI pilots – the reasons why most fail Only 5% of CRE operators achieve most of their AI program goals According to JLL’s 2025 Global Real Estate Technology Survey of more than 1,500 senior…
Read More