If you get your subscription page right, you can win the same customer month after month

Hi again 👋

If you sell anything on subscription, this one is for you.

First: the scale of the industry of the site I was looking at this week.

The UK fresh flower and plant market is worth a massive £2.2 billion a year, and about a fifth of that is now spent online. It's a category that has a huge surge in a few short weeks: Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and then not much slack in between. Get it wrong in peak season and there's no second chances until next year.

​Here's what this week’s review video looks like in practice:​

This week I was browsing through one of the bigger UK flower sites without a mouse - the same way millions of people browse each day.

The first thing to notice is that the account and basket links weren't in the tab order at all, so a keyboard user sails right past them. Without these - there’s no way to reach your account or your basket. And importantly, the choice between a monthly subscription and paying upfront was also unreachable. That's a basic test.

Then if the user gets as far as the delivery form - they're invited to add a gift message, a recipient name, address, and postcode.

However - none of these form fields had accessible labels.

So for anyone using a screen reader, each field in the form simply reads out as "Empty textbox”, “Empty textbox”, “Empty textbox.” There’s no non-visual way to tell which box is which - which is the equivalent of stripping every label off the form for a sighted user. At that point they're left guessing, and I think I'd have given up.

And someone, somewhere, doesn't get their flowers 💔

A missing label is an incredibly easy fix. Half a days work to fix this page - max.

But let's look at what it costs

If that page was selling a single £25 bouquet, the bug costs you one sale. £25.

It wasn't. It was a subscription.

So you don't lose £25. You lose it this month, and again next month, and every month after, for as long as that customer would have stayed.

Suddenly £25 looks a lot more like £250+.

Same bug. Very different bill. And that's just for one customer.

Apply it to everyone who hits the same wall during a Valentine's or Mother's Day rush, and the page nobody tested turns into an expensive problem.

Testing is often performed using a mouse - but unless you follow the same user journeys as a screen reader user - then you’re potentially excluding 10% - 15% of your audience.

So a question worth asking this week: when did anyone last try to subscribe to your service using only a keyboard?

If the answer is "never", that's the page I'd start with.

​📹 Watch this weeks review video​

Talk soon,
Dave

P.S. Have you ever spotted something like this on your own product pages? Hit reply and let me know - I read every reply.