16 Feb 2008 0950H

The end of cart?

Rehashing an old post from last year, but, now, everywhere it can be seen that the walls that form that decade-old convention of shopping cart as a label are crumbling down. Bag, basket — “my gear” even, on one site — it does not really seem to matter to people, so long as there is an icon in the top right corner with the number of items in the cart and the subtotal. And it seems much more prevalent among softline retailers than anyone else. That’s what web usage is telling me increasingly these days.

Once I heard an EVP justify their decision of changing the cart label because they wanted to emphasize they were a specialty retailer. That was only a little pretentious. Somehow I restrained myself from calling him a downscale panderer to dowdy middle aged and older women who collect sentimental porcelain figures and who are high risk candidates for having more than 20 cats in their home in their dotage.

In my humble opinion, you emphasize your specialness by specializing the line of goods, promoting your unique value, and inspiring the customer to be passionate about your brands, not by inserting labels and adding nonsensical items to the global nav bar.

I still don’t like the use of the “bag” label. When I put things into my shopping bag in a store, I get picked up by loss prevention for shoplifting. Death to Bag!

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Filed under Information Architecture, Usability, Web

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2 responses to "The end of cart?"

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19 Feb 2008 1805H

Tim writes:

Holy crap that was hilarious. Hummel anyone? Anyone?

31 May 2008 2347H

whataslacker writes:

hey that comment about the cats hurts…any who….i don’t like bag either, prefer cart or basket. what else is out there?

And now it's your turn.

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