Everything In Between

Shopping carts have become a ubiquitos concept on the Web. It seems that everyone from mom and pop stores to huge corporations have shopping carts on their web sites. Everywhere you shop online, each site has its own little handbasket for you to drop its products off in.

The other day a new start-up company asked me for advice on their Web site. Specifically, they wanted to know if they needed to install a shopping cart, and if it would help with their sales.

This brings up a really interesting point that many sites should look into. Are shopping carts really necessary? In what situations do they help, and in which do they hinder? Most importantly, do they really increase sales?

To answer this question appropriately, I had to take a close and careful look at what their site was selling, who the target audience is, and why they are browsing the Web site. Contrary to popular belief, it is not a given fact that every online store needs a shopping cart, and the misapplication of shopping carts can actually have a disastrous effect on sales.

Too often sales are lost because of shopping carts and the online check-out procedure. According to some statistics, up to 75% of customers who shop online regularly abandon their purchases when confronted with complicated check-out forms. This phenomenon is known as shopping cart abandonment. Though well-intentioned, shopping carts can add a lot of confusion and hassle to a process Web users are already potentially uncomfortable with. To use the marketing terminology, they muck up your sales path! Consider the following flaws in most shopping carts:

1. Design; shopping carts are confusing! They have lots of different components, lots of forms, and it’s not always clear what does what, no matter how boldly you’ve labeled something.
2. Hassle; online e-commerce check-out procedures are getting longer and longer. Sometimes it’s just easier, quicker, and less of a hassle to get an item elsewhere.
3. Too personal; when was the last time you were asked for your home address when buying something from a real-world store? Well, you give out a lot more than that every time you fill in a check-out form online. That scares people, and rightfully so!

On the other hand, there are legitimate arguments for why you would want to install a shopping cart in your store.

1. It’s familiar. Some visitors are so used to online shopping carts that they feel strange placing an order from a site without one. In short, a shopping cart can add legitimacy to your online business, ironically by making it seem like a bigger or more sophisticated corporation than it really is.
2. It encourages browsing. By placing an item “in your shopping cart” you can return to it later.

There are both pros and cons to using a shopping cart. In order to use a cart effectively, and certainly before you spend the time and money installing one, you must make an informed decision as to why you think you need it in the first place.

Shopping carts typically work best in situations where a site is offering lots of varied items for sale and where these items are products rather than services. This is why sites like Amazon, Barnes and Noble Booksellers, and Sony use shopping carts. They benefit because the shopping cart offers a means for customers to “bookmark” items they are interested yet still continue searching for other products that might be better suited to their personal needs.

There are two major cases where shopping carts typically hinder a visitor rather than help them, however. The first is in the case where a site is offering a very specialized or specific niche service and/or product. The second is when there is only a very small number of services and/or products available for sale.

Take, for example, the case of DressYourCurves.com, nice folks who offer personalized fasion advice. Each of their services is extremely specific. If I’m at their site, there can only be a few things I’m looking for and each of those involve getting fasion advice (something I probably need, though they only offer advice for women). Since they offer a small number of very specific services, there’s no need for a shopping cart, and indeed it would only slow down the process by which I pay and get my advice! DressYourCurves.com thus meets the criteria of both of these cases where a shopping cart is unnecessary.

The bottom line is, shopping carts can be an obstacle rather than a convenience if you use them improperly or in the wrong places. Before you go installing one think carefully about how your average visitor will feel about using it and what using it will mean to the overall shopping experience you are trying to convey.

Whether or not it is a good idea to install a shop in your online store will ultimately be a judgement call. Sometimes it’s really a far better option to devise your own purchase pages so that you can keep them as simple and direct as you can. If you do decide to install a cart, make sure it’s one that you can easily customize in order to fit it as innocuosly as possible into your site’s sales path. Many carts offer the ability to customize their look and feel, but this is often not as simple as they make it seem. To date, the best shopping cart and e-commerce solution available (in my humble opinion) is osCommerce.

And while I’m on the subject, I’d be very interested to hear about both good and bad experiences you may have had with shopping carts.

May all your visitors be customers and may all your customers be repeat visitors! Good luck!

A short while ago my brother asked me if there was some way he could get to his home computer from his College dorm. This isn’t such a huge technical problem as it is a security concern.

His home computer was essentially the family computer. It has games, pictures, a music library, and lots of old homework. But it also has financial records, private email, and the like. Every family computer is a treasure trove of vital information for thieves and crackers. Its information would be far more valuable than a bunch of jewelry or the children’s stash of allownace, so you can clearly see why making a connection from the Internet to the family computer requires some security considerations.

This whole situation got me thinking of the state of information security as a whole. When it comes right down to it, my family’s home system is relatively more secure than most home or small business networks. Keeping the computer behind a firewall helps somewhat right off the bat because it separates us from the rest of our ISP‘s subnet. That’s probably the most important security step anyone can take, and its so utterly easy. I’ve walked into offices countless times where a single computer was plugged right into the cable or DSL line. That’s just inviting trouble!

The situation with dialup Internet access is much worse. Consider AOL, for example. For years, customers have been logging into their AOL accounts using no security precautions at all. Username and password sent in the clear, which is about as secure as writing your bank account and PIN numbers on the back of a postcard. To add insult to injury, AOL is now charging users extra for a secure log-in procedure, which is nothing more than pure greed. Two questions come to mind:

1. Why did it take more than a decade to implement a secure log-in procedure?
2. Why, when it finally comes, is it being offered only as a premium service?

This is sending absolutely the wrong message to computer users everywhere.

The issue I take with it, of course, is that while iron-clad protection is indeed difficult if not impossible to achieve, an enormous difference can be made with just a little bit effort. In AOL‘s case, simple security such as end-to-end encryption during a log-in procedure should not be an incredibly difficult task to achieve. While their rotational password scheme does offer an added layer of security, and makes encryption a little less important as far as log-ins go, does this mean that regular users will just have to suck it up and be content with their lack of security?

I sure as hell wouldn’t be.

Here’s a useful little snippet of CSS2 lifted straight off a personal project I’ve been working on. The following four rules display, find, and insert appropriate punctuation for making unordered lists read like English prose.

ul, ul li {
    display: inline; list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0;
}
li:after { content: ", "; }
li:last-child:after { content: "."; }
li+li:last-child:before { content: "and "; }

Here’s what’s happening.

1. First they display the entire list and each list item as an inline element. This causes them to show up right up against any other text around them.
2. Then they add a comma and a space after each list item.
3. The last list item, however, gets a period and no space.
4. Finally, the word “and” followed by a space is inserted before the last list item if, and only if, there is a list item before it (it has a sibling).

There you have it. List markup that looks just like a normal paragraph, complete with proper punctuation! A great little tip that makes lists a whole lot more flexible!

Note that as of this writing this won’t work in Internet Explorer because it can’t understand the last three rules. Since it does understand the first, the result will merely be an inline box for the whole list, sans punctuation.

In a recent article from DMEurope.com, Trenton Moss challenges Webmasters to do better than providing text-only pages as their solution to accessibility.

It’s good, too, because text-only pages which are lauded as an accessibility solution are often nothing more than a cop-out, and they’re often not even all that accessible. This is where CSS really shines, and why it’s so important to embrace CSS-based design techniques. Of course, that’s only part of the matter, but it is striking to see the difference it can make to accessibility, particularly for various Web browsing devices.

Good article.

Catching up on news feeds again since my weekend vacation in Vermont. I sincerely hope this is a sign of things to come.

Yesterday I did not publish a post. Which upsets me, because I was supposed to according to my publishing schedule. Naturally, apologies all around.

Danica’s parents arrived in town yesterday. We are supposed to meet them today though I’m not really sure what for. Danica is extremely stressed out about it. I hope she feels better soon.