Ordering Customer License Plates in Texas. Watch the Order

Several of us reatlors have personlized plates so I wanted to post this here:

I ordered a personalized plate for my son's car for his birthday. I have one on my car and it didn't cost a whole lot and I expected to have a simple order process and be done.  Well, the state has employed a third party vendor, MyPlates.com and nothing about this process has been simple.

The plate ended up costing me $600 because the website is set to default to the highest price selection and it's very unclear how to set it back. Here were my suggestions to them on their site:

________________________________________________

I called your customer service and got some GREAT assistance. Here's what I've learned:

1. The pricing is by the message, not the plate. This is NOT clear from the beginning. It appeared that the background design of the plate was driving the price but it's not.

2. the 10 year/5 year/1 year price selector is deceptive. 10 year is highlighted but there's no selection box, radio button or any other indicator that it is selected. It simply has a background color like other headers on the page. I would give it a check box or another affirmative selection that the user has to make. Seems a bit deceptive and I bet a lot of users end up paying a lot more than they intended.

3. The first thing a user sees is Check Availability. What the user doesn't see is (smaller print) Gift Card. So the plate you purchase needs to go on a car you own instead of being a gift. I would put a question in the order stream that says "Is this a gift" so it's clear when you put in the order information that you need to put the Car Owners' information, not the ordering person's information.

Clearly with the price changes either the state or the vendor has found a way to drive up revenue. I have a personalized plate from 3 years ago that cost me a fraction of the money and I doubt now that I would have done it this way. I think once you make a few website improvements people won't be confused.  I design sites and order almost everything on the web so I'm not an inexperienced user, but this one was very difficult to understand.