What’s With Bad Shopping Carts?

I think it’s a valid question at this point. I remember the first stuff being sold online which seems like an eternity ago, but was only about 15 years. Maybe to some people that IS an eternity. It seems both so short a time, but so far away.

Actually I don’t want to write about that but seriously… Fifteen years ago I was an oddball because I had a computer and even odder because I had a modem. I remember when I went to Grad School in the fall of ‘96 I had a laptop I brought with me for notes and people looked at me like I was a space alien. Most people hadn’t heard of the internet, and those that had thought it was spelled AOL.

Anyway I digress. Shopping carts. They’ve been around that long, and it seems on some websites they haven’t improved at all since those early heady days. There seem to be three types of Shopping Carts on the internet. The good, the bad, and the lazy.

The lazy ones are the ones like they were coded 10-15 years ago. I came across one of these just a couple days ago, and it spurred this blog post. I was purchasing season tickets to the Pitt Panther’s this fall, and the form was just godawful. The shopping experience itself was poor, and the shopping cart. Well it was just lazy. One big long form with every piece of information on it. Oh it wasn’t the worst lazy one i’ve seen. I’m sure you’ve come across them. You purchase something and there IS no shopping cart it’s just straight into purchase, and then it’s one form, and you fill it out and hit submit and the purchase is made, and they barely confirm it to you and you worry for a week that you got ripped off before the item hopefully arrives. Those. Lazy.

I guess you could call them Bad too, but I consider them more Lazy. It’s just not taking any time to learn what improves a process. The goal is to increase usability, but the reason is to increase sales, improve customer retention, and lower cart abandonment. Those are the three goals of all this. If you don’t care about any of that stuff, why are you selling anything at all?

Second. The bad. People who have put way too much personal thought into their shopping cart process without talking to users at all. You’ve probably seen these as well. Usually there is a big registration process to get you ‘involved’ in some way, and then there might even be complicated drag and drop processes to make your shopping cart all funky and cool, and things moving and confusing, and you don’t even know what you’re doing anymore. Those are bad. They’re not simply just refusing to learn what makes a site good, they’re changing what was, to something THEY think is good, without even thinking about the users. That’s worse to me than just being lazy.

Again, the goal here is to increase sales, improve retention, lower abandonment. Not show how cool your website is.

Ok so what simple things can be done, and proven to work by usability studies, to improve those three aspects of your shopping cart.

1) Before you even get into the cart offer some basic functionality on your site. Product searching is a must. Users expect this now. If they want a Terry Bradshaw signed football, then they should be able to search for one. Secondly Related items. Every item on your site should have related items, hopefully hand picked by you. If they like the Terry Bradshaw signed football, they might like his signed jersey to go along with it.

2) Call to action buttons. They need to be clear and obvious. Add to cart. Add to wishlist. View shopping cart. Proceed to Checkout etc. If it’s not blatantly obvious to a user how to add an item to his shopping cart, or to start the process to give you money you’re failing. This is surprisingly common.

Ok once they’ve picked up their two items into the shopping cart and clicked the very obvious ‘proceed to checkout’ button  what do we do….

3) Let them buy without registering. Don’t make them log in or register for your site. Don’t force them to respond to an email, or give you any kind of information. They want to buy. you let them. You’ll get information from them in the future, but right now it’s more important you get their money now. Forcing registration is one big way you’re going to have customers abandon their shopping carts.

4) Stagger the registration process. Don’t have one big long page with everything on it. People will abandon a form half filled, but not a process half complete. What I mean is that if you take a registration page and break it up into 4 or 5 chunks, if someone has completed 1 or 2 stages, they’re more likely to finish the process if they get interrupted, whereas one big unfinished form is easy to let go of.

5) Simplfiy. You don’t need to ask them marketing questions or find out where they normally vacation. You need to sell them something. Don’t try and do market research with your sales. Customers HATE that. They’ll abandon the cart rather than answer the questions.

6) Through the whole process be communicative. Address questions, explain errors, highight required fields. Hold their hand, and try and make it as easy and quick and painless as possible to get through it all. You don’t need to add barriers to sales, you need to remove them.

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Ok so how would a good sales process look? Ok let’s assume that the user has selected the Terry Bradshaw football and jersey. They click proceed to checkout.

Stage 1: Identify Them. You want to capture two things on this page. Email and password. This is an effective registration as well. You can identify them by their email and get them into your system. Also they won’t hopefully forget their email. Don’t do usernames. People forget usernames. They’re a waste of time. As far as the password goes have the password field, and a confirm password field, just to make sure since they can’t see their password when they enter it, becuase you’re hopefully using a password field there. Also preferably have the constant check of the level of security of the password. You know where it says low medium or high security, and suggests things like adding a number or a capital letter, etc.

Once you get through stage 1 you’ve got their email. Even if they don’t finish the process you can send them a reminder in the future if they abandon the cart “hey we noticed you never finished blah blah blah….”

Stage 2: Shipping Address. If you’re shipping something, you need the address. If it’s an online delivery format, discern it here. This stage is about how they’re getting what you’re giving them. If it’s an online login you can skip this step and give it to them after the confirmation. If you’re shipping something to them though this is the enter your shipping address and pick your shipping type stage. Be sure not to piss off people from other countries too. A form that adjusts the fields per country you ship too will be appreciated. IE if you want to sell to Candians as well as Americans be sure your form handles it. Don’t just have american states in the dropdowns, or a 5 digit postal code.

Stage 3: Billing Information. Here you’ll need to capture their billing address, be sure to have it default to the same as the shipping address, and let them change it if they want to. Then grab their payment information, credit card, etc.

Stage 4: Confirm order for the user before you process the purchase. Show what they’re buying, all the taxes, etc, list out out like an invoice, hopefully with pictures to remind them of what they’re getting. let them click a final button to confirm the purchase. Make it obvious to the user that ‘if you click this button you’re buying it…right here.” Show your security. SSL, trust symbols, Verisign, your own thing. Whatever. Let them know that their purchase is secure and they’re ok.

Stage 5: You confirm to the user the purchase was made, you show them what theyr’e getting, confirm their information, tell them what to do if there is a problem. Hopefully you’ve also sent an email to them, let them know that you’ve sent an email, make them a confirmation notice, with an order number that they can print out a hard copy of and reference.

Then if you want to start doing market research on them you can. You can ask some more questions if you want, but only after it’s obvious that they’re done. Most people will leave at that point, but tha’t sok. You’ve got them to make a purchase, and you’ve got their contact information.

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Anyway is that so hard? Can’t everyone just do that? If you’re not doing that you’re leaving money on the table, guaranteed.