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!

How hard do you think it should be to find some information on the Internet? Not very. Google makes it easy to find information, but they don’t host any of it. That means that when Google tells me that it found something I might be interested in, I have to go the source to find it.

While Google does its job very well, the source of the information doesn’t always give it up so easily. For instance, earlier today I wanted to find a brief summary statement of Vincent van Gough’s life. Just a little blurb, nothing fancy like images or some kind of wow-me-silly presentation. Just a line that looked something like “Vincent van Gough was born in … he painted this many paintings in this style. Etc, etc….”

Naturally, I googled the term. Among others, that brought me to the ArtCyclopedia page on Vincent van Gough. But wait, don’t click on that link! Why? Because it’s a redirect page!

After searching for nearly 20 minutes, getting a redirect page was more than just frustrating, it was painful. First of all, there’s no reason at all why a redirect page can’t be automatic. Even a simple http-equiv="refresh" would have been better than making me click the link. I actually spent some time looking for link to the page I was supposed to go to because their link wasn’t clear enough.

Which leads me to point number one about redirects:

Always put the link at the top of the page, and make it as prominent as possible!

To get more technical, there’s actually no reason why a redirect page should be necessary at all! Using sever-side scripting one could easily output a Location HTTP header and be done with it. Alternatively, you could simply put a Redirect permanent line in a .htaccess file. And if you needed anything fancier, Apache’s mod_rewrite can turn any URI into any filename request imagineable!

So in the end, this redirect page wasn’t even necessary!

The real blow hit me when I actually got the right page. The problem here is two-fold.

1. No information about Vincent van Gough is directly on the page. You need to click on hyperlinks to find anything out.
2. The page is divided into two sections; a navbar sits on the left side of the site. But that navbar is frozen on the screen somehow and doesn’t scroll with the rest of the site! This wouldn’t be a problem if I had a monitor the length of a city block, but as it stands it presents a major navigational problem: I can’t get to the rest of the links, presumably where my desired information is, because the links aren’t accessible!

I wish this were a rare problem, but bad web sites like these exist in abundance all over the place. In the end, I got my information from Jordan, an 8th grader with better design skills than whoever did that blasted ArtCyclopedia design. Thank you Jordan!

It occured to me today that the prevalence of badly-designed computer programs is depressingly common. More depressing, however, is the fact that this badly-designed technology is considered normal, espoused as right on par. Even worse, regardless of quality, almost any upgrade or advance to the next version number is seen as an "improvement" for the mere fact that some annoyances have been fixed or improved upon.

This begs the question, why wasn’t the original version as good as this one? Yes, I tried my hand at developing some programs, and I completely understand the development cycle but it does seem rather silly that many programs which truly suck in terms of usability and user-friendliness are released as final products. Not until version 3 or 4 do such programs actually become useable by the majority of computer users out there.

This was all sparked by my discovery of Firefox’s (or, really, the Mozilla code-base’s) development of extensions. While working on the SandorSzenassy.com web gallery redesign, I was rather disappointed when I couldn’t find the option to show the site navigation toolbar in Firefox, a feauture present in the Mozilla and Netscape browsers as well as some others.

This prompted me to head on over to MozillaZine and suggest that the feature be added to Firefox, or how I could get it if it already existed. Sure enough, the link toolbar extension was available and I immediately downloaded it.

After that, I started exploring other extensions, and came across the Web Developer Toolbar. I’ve just been playing with it for a few moments already, but I am so impressed that I already have that "How did I get along with this for so long?" feeling. Five minutes with this baby, and you will too!

Hoorah for making my life easier! Moral of the story: if there’s an easier way to do something, go look for the way. You’ll be glad you did.