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OK, so the title isn’t strictly true there is one important
factor in ecommerce shopping cart design and two things you have to do
achieve it. The goal is to make people purchase your product. The two
things you have to do to make them buy is to help and persuade.
When you design a site you need to pay serious attention to it’s
usability and it’s persuasive abilities. The aim of a good
eCommerce solutions is to gently (or not so gently) persuade the sites
user to purchase the product they want to make sure that they find this
as easy as possible you need to make sure that your website is as
usable as possible. There are thousands of usability and persuasive
design methodologies and we don’t intend to cover them all in
this article. We have identified a couple of the most important factors
in both areas and given you some tips and guidance to help you tailor
your shopping cart software to increase sales.
Usability Design
When a customer lands on your internet store they will only have a
certain amount of patience, once this all runs out they will give up
and leave your site for one of your competitors. The easier your site
is to use and the less they have to think about how it works the longer
they will stay on your site, and the more likely they will be to
purchase from you.
With the increase in the use of CSS and the increasing accessibility of
graphic manipulation packages people are able to completely customise
the way the ‘things you click’ on their web-site look, the
limit it pretty much their own imagination. Unfortunately this can lead
to some confusion for users who have to think about what is clickable
and what isn’t, this will cause them to get frustrated.
With text links it’s best to follow HTML tradition, keeping links
in a contrasting colours and keep them underlined. Users also like to
know where they have been, so keeping links that have been visited in
another colour is good practice.
The best course of actions with buttons is to … well…
make them look like buttons. I know it seems patronising but a lot of
people forget this when they’ve spent a lot of time making sure
the buttons on their site fit in with the design. Raised looking
buttons are difficult to make look nice and clean without them looking
a little ‘2001' but it’s really worth spending a little
time thinking about your buttons.
One of the easiest way to lose customers is to actually lose them. If
you customers can’t find their way around your store, or
can’t find their way to wherever they want to be they’re
not going to buy from you.
What’s the best way to achieve this? Well it’s probably by
using tabs. they give a good idea of where the user is, and how they
can get to where they want to be.
Tag Lines are frequently dismissed from modern website design in order
to make at design look less cluttered, and certainly there are
situation where removing a tag line will do no harm but generally there
are useful. It is important that a customer know as quickly as possible
if your site will sell the product they are looking for. A good example
of this is Amazon when they first launched they used a tag-line similar
to ‘Online Bookstore’ because when customer landed on their
page they would have had to think a little to work out that a company
called Amazon was in fact an online book store. However as Amazon are
now so well known they have removed it as it's no longer needed.
Persuasive Design
Once you've addressed the Usability of your store and your visitors can
find their way around your site easily and find their way to where they
want to be, you must then consider the second important part of the
design. You need to make then go to where YOU want them too, the order
confirmation page. Below are 3 tips for making this happen.
Once the user has put some items into their cart and clicked on the
checkout button there is a good chance that they really want to buy
something. So whatever you do make it as easy as possible for them to
put their credit card details in and click the order confirm button.
A design practice that we implement is removing all unnecessary links
from the order process. For example all links to the ‘home’
and search boxes are removed. If the user goes searching for other
products then it’s possible that they’ll get side tracked
and forget that they were going to buy your products. But make sure
that the user still has access to the information about the product
that they’re buying, we try to implement this by including all
the information on the shopping cart page, or by linking to pop-up with
the info in, we don’t link back to the original product page as
this could lead to further distractions.
Long checkout processes with multiple pages is also something that
should be avoided. Only ask the customer for information that you
really need.
One of the main ways that people will look for products on your site is
by using the search box. Rigging (or Mapping) your searches will allows
you to map products to keyword, so when a customer searches for a word
related to a product that does not include the keywords in the title or
the product text you can make sure the products show up. This is just
like a customer asking a shop assistance for a product when they know
what they want the product to do, but are just not sure of the name of
the product.
You need to make your product descriptions and products images as
descriptive as possible, don’t ever assume that your customers
are as well versed on your products as you are. If there is something
they want to know and you haven’t covered they will do one of
three things:
. Ask you, which happens a lot less than you would imagine.
. Go and look on a competitors web-site, if they have the information then it’s likely you’ve lost a customer.
. Give Up.
Also the more information that you include the more ’spider
food’ there is got the search engines, writing the product
descriptions is a good time to focus on Search Engine Optimisation.
Following a couple of these simple guidelines you should see a marked
increase in the conversion rate for your store. There are also many
other usability and persuasive design models that you can apply and we
defiantly recommend searching for some more to apply to your shopping
cart.
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