Not Registered? Please Sign Up First: A Randomized Field Experiment on the Ex Ante Registration Request

Online commerce websites often request users to register in the online shopping process. Recognizing the challenges of user registration, many websites opt to delay their registration request until the end of the conversion funnel (i.e., ex post registration request). A new study in Information Systems Research explores an alternative approach by asking users to register with the website at the beginning of their shopping journey (i.e., ex ante registration request). The authors of the study, Ni Huang (University of Houston), Probal Mojumder (University of Southern California), Tianshu Sun (University of Southern California), Jinchi Lv (University of Southern California), and Joseph M. Golden (Collage.com), show that the ex ante request leads to an increased probability of user registration. Furthermore, the ex ante request leads to considerable increases in customer purchases in the long run and does not significantly influence sales in the short run. Further investigation into the long-term and short-term effects provides suggestive evidence on several potential mechanisms, such as firm-initiated interaction (e.g., email marketing campaigns) and screening of low-interest users (i.e., users with low initial valuations of the website and in a potentially disengaged state). This study provides managerial implications on the design of user-registration systems in e-commerce websites.