Designing the sign-up process?

Question

I am starting a website consisting of info on local shops, product catalogs, and coupons. now I am in a dilemma over the vendor sign-up process. I want to know which of the following ways should I do it:

1. just ask for contact info, email and get back to them?
2. ask for all details like shop name, type, address, website, contact person name, and then after I verify the details, activate the account and let them fill in the remaining details?

In short what is the best way to get maximum sign ups or how to develop a sign-up which doesn't ask for endless details and reduces abandonment?

Answer 1

First let the vendor create a basic profile by registering their Shop name, email id, and contact info. Then when they signup you can show a bar on the dashboard like LinkedIn's

or some sort of ticker saying "Please complete you profile for best experience" similar to the one shown in image below. This helps us in notifying the vendor in a very polite manner

and of course you can send then a periodic mail for the same purpose

Then the vendor can complete their profiles in a multi-step process. In this way, the vendors can fill up their profile as per their convenience. Example of such form could be like this:

So, when a user's profile is say 90-100% complete, then you can activate his account for transactions.

Check out my answer on Single page or multi-page forms? as it may help you decide.

Answer 2

Start off by asking for the least amount of information necessary to create an account (usually just email address), and then create the account. Then when they log in for the first time, they are presented with a form with the other necessary information that they need to fill in.

Once someone is committed to a decision, they are far less likely to back away from it. Hence, this strategy results in a significantly smaller dropoff rate than asking for all the information upfront.

If you sign up for Gravatar you will get an example of this style of process.