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Shopping cart at a glance

Site Genre: Pattern Group f

magnify imageFigureF3.1 Amazon.com’s shopping cart keeps navigation to the rest of the site clearly indicated at the top of the page, but it makes checking out even clearer. For a business that makes money online through sales, it is critical that customers easily find their way to checkout.

Background

After customers select products from a CLEAN PRODUCT DETAIL (F2) page, a successful PERSONAL E-COMMERCE (A1) site will use a well-designed shopping cart to lead the customer to the start of a QUICK-FLOW CHECKOUT (F1), removing any barriers to making the purchase.

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PROBLEM

Customers want to collect and purchase several items in one transaction. Online shopping carts can provide much more than their offline namesakes, such as making it easy to change the quantity of an item in the cart. However, making shopping carts simple and useful requires restraint.

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SOLUTION

magnify image FigureF3.7 A good shopping cart shows customers details about what they?????re about to buy, including how much the order is going to cost, and then makes it easy to check out without being distracted.

Give customers easy access to the shopping cart from every page of your site. On product detail pages, make the Add to Cart buttons hard to miss. On the shopping cart page itself, provide highly visible action buttons leading to checkout and action buttons to continue shopping, along with the top-level navigation elements and search features. For each product in the cart, include the product name, a short description, a link to the product page, availability time frame, price, quantity, a button to delete each item, shipping, tax, and subtotal information or links. Display a link to your return policy. Optionally, you might also cross-sell and up-sell other products on the cart page, and put a summary of the cart contents on every site page.

Other Patterns to Consider

One common feature on CLEAN PRODUCT DETAIL (F2) pages is to let people add items to the shopping cart. From the shopping cart page, provide a HIGH-VISIBILITY ACTION BUTTON (K5) to let people start the QUICK-FLOW CHECKOUT (F1). The shopping cart is a good place for CROSS-SELLING AND UP-SELLING (G2), recommending products that may be useful, given the current items in the shopping cart. Issues of INTERNATIONALIZED AND LOCALIZED CONTENT (D10) are becoming important as more people worldwide use the Web. Therefore, make sure the title of your shopping cart makes sense for the culture or country using your site. Provide links to your return policy to enable EASY RETURNS (F9) and to assure your customers that they can change their minds if they’re not satisfied.

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