As of today, social shopping startup Fab no longer requires people to sign up for its e-commerce service to view products on the site.
The New York company also announced that it now has 7 million registered members. That’s up from 6 million in early August.
From this point forward, you only need to log in to Fab to actually purchase or favorite an item for sale. Logical as that may seem, it actually took Fab 15 months to get to this point. Writes founder and CEO Jason Goldberg:
For 15 months now, visitors to the Fab.com website have had to login in order to view the products on our website. This helped us gain 7 million registered members, but it was not a great user experience.
Great user experiences get out of the way and help people get shit done. Our mobile experience has not required login — that was the right way to do it.
From now on, this is what users – in the US at least – will see when they visit Fab.com without logging in to the site (also see screenshot at the bottom):
Goldberg claims Fab gets 50 percent of all its signups from social sharing, which means a lot of people couldn’t see the items that it offered for sale on its website from the first moment they visited Fab.
Goldberg says there are now nearly 10,000 products on Fab every day, adding that it was silly to ‘hide’ them behind a login or sign up roadblock:
Why are we hiding them?!?! Duh! We want nothing more than for people to come to Fab and discover and find everyday amazing design finds that make them go Wow!
We’re building the world’s greatest design store. We should be making it as easy as possible for people to shop it! Again, just get out of the way.
It will be interesting to see what kind of impact this has on impulsive first-time purchases for Fab, which this move will evidently increase.
Fab recently announced that Maria Molland, previously its chief international officer, was appointed ‘chief European officer’ and that she will hence lead Fab’s further expansion across the continent.
At the time, Fab said 23 percent of its members reside in Europe.
Interestingly, the signup-to-browse-Fab requirement has now been removed from Fab.com in the United States, but Europeans will need to wait 10 days for that.
Also read:
Social shopping site Fab upgrades mobile experience with Live Feed and more, adds Facebook Connect
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.