Your CAPTCHA May Be Hurting Your Sales

Today, the vast majority of e-commerce and travel sites require some sort of CAPTCHA to perform specific, more sensitive tasks for a significant percentage of users. There are multiple types of CAPTCHAs — they can ask users to decode blurry text, determine which parts of a picture contains a tree or a traffic light, solve a simple math problem or comprehend a word against a field of noisy audio.

Anything that interrupts a user’s experience will drive abandonment. This is true for making a purchase, logging into a site or posting a review — all of which are desirable behaviors from real users. But in an era of cheap computing and powerful open-source AI, humans will soon be far worse at solving CAPTCHAs than machines. At the same time, more challenging CAPTCHAs also go against a core UX principle: make the user’s experience smoother, faster and better, not more disjointed, slower and worse. Additionally, it’s not practical to apply CAPTCHAs to every page. This means bots can freely roam over large portions of a site.

Many experts in website conversions also think CAPTCHAs do more harm than good. Research by SEO firm MOZ found that, while CAPTCHAs reduced bot-driven submissions to website forms by 88%, the puzzles discouraged viable shoppers at such a rate that sites using CATPCHAs saw a 3.2% decline in good conversions.

So what can you do? You can run A/B tests month over month to see if CAPTCHAs help or hurt. Additionally, site reliability engineers and web operations teams should consider better ways to stop attacks. A number of technology services can accurately identify bot traffic before it hits your page based on criteria that might include user behavior, browser fingerprint, IP address reputation, network location and more.

Rather than apply CAPTCHA to every visitor, site operators should only force a CAPTCHA when they are pretty sure a query is from a bot and not a live human. Even then, it’s important to watch for signs that you are annoying users, such as increases in shopping cart abandonment or drops in reviews or log-ins. Yes, allowing bots free rein on your sites can wreak havoc. But sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, and as each generation of CAPTCHAs grows harder, their value diminishes and their risks increase, you should look for a new type of medicine.

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