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). Our study 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). Guided by a stylized analytical model, we conducted a large-scale randomized field experiment in partnership with an online retailer in the United States to examine how the ex ante request affects users’ registration decisions, short-term customer conversions, and long-term purchase behaviors. Specifically, we randomly assigned the new users in the website’s incoming traffic to one of two experimental groups: one with an ex ante registration request preceding the ex post request (treatment) and the other with only an ex post registration request (control). Our results show that the ex ante request leads to an increased probability of user registration; that is, the users in the treatment group, on average, are 58.08% relatively more likely to register with the website than those in the control group. Furthermore, the ex ante request leads to significant increases in customer purchases in the long run. Based on our estimation of the local average treatment effects, the ex ante registered users are 10.89% relatively more likely to make a purchase, place a 16.76% relatively greater number of orders, and generate 13.22% relatively higher total revenue for the firm in the long run. Finally, the ex ante request also does not impact customer conversion in the short-term. Further investigation into the long-term and short-term effects provides suggestive evidence on several potential mechanisms, such as firm-initiated interaction and screening of low-interest users. Our study provides managerial implications to the e-commerce websites on customer acquisition and contributes to the research on IT artifact design.