24 Nov 2009 1008H

New thoughts on shopping carts and the e-commerce experience

Today observed my wife shopping online and cussing out the webpage at checkout. You see, she is one of the many people — not a majority of users certainly, but definitely a persona to be designed for — out there who I observed at Sears, MyGofer, Hallmark, Borders, Wilton, so on — who use the shopping cart as a kind of basket: they put things in as a kind of temporary holding area for later decision making. Later, right before checkout, as they review the cart, they remove the items that they don’t immediately want. Now if I were running the e-commerce strategy, this group of customers is not one I would ignore. They have already increased your lift, so, what you want is to push them to convert, perhaps by incentivising them to do so via special combination offers, such as Amazon has been offering for some time: Buy this item A and this item B together for $XX.XX and so on. Another thing I would do is probably to allow users to do a visual comparison in the cart, without taking the users back to the detail pages for those items. I might use a kind of special view of the cart to do this or preview in place. Now, originally I had deplored the use of the cart for anything more than a confirmation page directly proceeding to the checkout flow funnel, but, I have come to realize that the cart represents this opportunity, untapped, to press the advantage. Perhaps it is there that I would position the offer to buy both for a special price, or buy all the items at a special discount for same type items.

Permanent link to New thoughts on shopping carts and the e-commerce experience

Filed under Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Strategy, User Experience

Be the first to respond to "New thoughts on shopping carts and the e-commerce experience"

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

No responses yet.

And now it's your turn.

Fire your weapon, soldier. Just be careful of friendly fire. NAME & EMAIL required.

Your response