How to Design the Ideal Ecommerce Shopping Cart

When it comes to designing and developing a functional ecommerce website that maximizes revenue, the shopping cart is one of the single-most important elements. It’s the last touch point for visitors and can single handedly destroy a conversion if the right amount of thought isn’t put into it. Are you doing everything you can to create a fast, efficient, and frictionless shopping cart experience?

 

Try These 5 Shopping Cart Optimization Tricks

Your shopping cart isn’t something you develop and then leave alone. It’s an element of your website that needs to be continually optimized. Here are a few helpful tips and tricks:

1.  Provide Adequate Detail

Once a customer clicks through to the shopping cart page, you want to either encourage them to add more to their order or finalize the purchase. The last thing you can afford is for the customer to feel confused and click away from the page. In order to avoid this, provide adequate information about the products they’ve placed in their cart. For example, if they’ve put a shirt in cart, clearly label the size, color, pattern, material, and other important details. This reassures them that they’ve chosen the right item and helps facilitate a smoother checkout.

2.  Minimize the Number of Pages

With each page you require a customer to click through within the checkout process, your chances of losing the sale greatly increase. If possible, aim for a one-page checkout that allows customers to input their information and finalize the transaction without ever bringing up a new page or window.

3. Allow for Guest Checkout

From a customer’s perspective, few things are more annoying than being required to sign up for an account on a website just to make a purchase. If you require registration prior to checkout, expect for your shopping cart abandonment rate to hover above 90 percent. The better solution is to allow for guest checkout and then encourage registration after the transaction is complete.

4.  Don’t Surprise Customers

In addition to having a distaste for account registration, most customers are turned off by surprises. The worst thing you can possibly do is wait until the last page of checkout to let customers know how much shipping will be, or that sales tax applies to the purchase. All of this information should be included as soon as possible to set realistic expectations.

5. Save the Shopping Cart

It’s totally normal behavior for people to add items to their shopping cart as a placeholder and then continue shopping. You need to make sure they don’t forget about these items. The best way to do this is by making the shopping cart visible from anywhere on the site and to ensure the shopping cart stays active whenever customers return in the future.

Don’t Squander a Conversion

Shopping cart abandonment is a major problem for just about every ecommerce company. The average calculated shopping cart abandonment rate – based on 37 different studies – is 69.23 percent. In other words, more than two out of three customers that add items to a shopping cart won’t end up finalizing the purchase. Some of the most successful ecommerce businesses in the world even have abandonment rates of 75 percent or more.

While the data clearly shows that some shopping cart abandonment is normal, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be trying to reduce your rate. Imagine if you could go from 69 percent to just 55 or 60 percent. Depending on your sales figures, this could potentially lead to an increase of tens of thousands of dollars of revenue.

Now’s the time to get serious about your shopping cart. Are you ready to give it the attention it deserves?