Building A Better User Experience In Your Shopping Cart

While operating on some e commerce associate sites,  I tried to locate the e commerce merchant’s shipping prices. Unluckily, it’s a extraordinary pain in the neck to find shipping info at most popular e commerce stores.

I believe it’s because they place a blind reliance in their e commerce store’s shopping cart. The difficulty is that the cart was generally created by a programmer – not a customer service rep. So the priorities in design were simple coding, not easy buying. As an effect, lots of shopping carts make happen SMBs to lose sales.

Here are some illustrations of what not to do, and why they’re bad ideas. If the e commerce cart you would like acts this way, switch!

1) Most awful idea EVER: Ask for my credit card info before telling me the shipping price.

I don’t be concerned about/believe your reassurance the card isn’t going to be charged until I click confirm.

I don’t know you. And your site looks like a 4 year old made it.

Quality graphics develop trust – this is a famous finding in survey after survey and usability test after test, as to what consumers use to estimate a site’s honesty.

Asking for card information before telling me what shipping is going to cost would by no means even take place to someone offline. Visualize you go into a used car dealership and the salesman says, “give me your credit card info, then I’ll tell you the price!” – No thanks!

2) Aggravating, close second: late presenting shipping rate information until I get to the page where I type my shipping info.

While this may be reasonable, it considers two things, wrongly:

a) First, that I’m going to add to cart and go through a step or two in the procedure without knowing the total price. That’s more or less the same as above.
b) Second, that you can’t just comprise a easy shipping calculator on product detail pages. It just wishes to ask the Zip code and return a price. Simple database job that doesn’t cost more than $100 to program.

3) Third most awful idea: Making money off shipping.

Yes, plenty of people do it online. No, most consumers won’t find out. Buuuuuuuut…

What happens when you get caught cheating customers on shipping?

I’m not the first affiliate to produce a price assessment site. Heaven knows there’s lots of them around.
It doesn’t cost much to have a practical assistant browse the web and do the legwork to find product prices and shipping rates.
And affiliates, together with myself, are more and more SEO savvy, as well as usability savvy.

What happens is that you finish up with a reputation management difficulty that costs you sales of that product. How?

People click on the price comparison outcome in Google and find you’re more costly.
Guess who gets the sale?

If it happens oftenly enough or deliberately enough, you build up a bad reputation and word gets around. Then you don’t just lose sales on that one product, but across the board. Ouch.

So imagine long term, relatively than trying to take in a few additional bucks at [what turns out to be] your own expense.

A) Outstanding approach: For low-ticket items (e.g. below ~$200), present flat rate shipping countrywide, or statewide/provincewide. Present shipping rates in a chart. If you require to adjust a few dimes/dollars upwards for states further away, you can do so.

This isn’t ‘making money on shipping’ – it’s increasing handiness to customers. You can explain it, and people will know. Consumers aren’t in opposition to profit, they’re in opposition to mistreatment.

Carry away tips on e commerce shopping carts and shipping rate information:
1) Present shipping information on the detail page.

2) If probable, provide flat-rate shipping countrywide. Or else, you can present state-by-state (or province-by-province, in Canada) shipping rates in a table. Figure out your average price to ship to that state and make use of it.

3) If the order is huge enough and you can pay for it, upgrade the shipping so it gets to customers quicker than projected. Amazon is well-known for this practice – which they preferred over TV ads – and look how well it’s helped them do.

See few of ready shopping cart solutions from here