Re: Recommendation for Shopping Cart Expert

From: Randall Rensch <randy_at_rensch.com>
Date: Mon 27 Jun 2005 13:15:31 -0500

>We get plenty of traffic, but it stops dead at the cart. It is
>not at all obvious what we carry and the buying process is far from
>intuitive with far too many clicks necessary.

I run a few small but growing stores and will be interested in the
answers to the rest of your question. (They use Mercantec SoftCart, but
I don't recommend it. I have had clients who are please with Miva
Merchant, used at your site, but you're right, it's not something I'd
want to learn from scratch, and as I recall, it has a "remote
processing" aspect that annoys me.)

But as for the above, I made a test order (hope you don't mind -- it
will say "online-ads-test" in it). From that experience, I'm not sure
your problem is with the cart... at least until the very end. Here are
my observations:

Just to make things interesting, I allowed only session cookies, and
also disallowed JavaScript. The good news is that there was no problem.

Other good news is that your site must be valuable to the legal
community. Or else they all have low-res, OSHA-compliant monitors,
because on my hi-res 19" monitor the fixed type size is miniscule and no
fun to squint at. There are ways to enable the user to change type sizes
(such as browser-defined sizes, or a link that changes among style
sheets). You may want to look into those.

Your use of alternating background bars makes the list of products much
easier to follow. But it's just titles. A small suggestion at this
point... seeing that it's already a long list, you might as well make it
a bit longer by adding some descriptive blurbs, or a rotating set of
"featured" best sellers. In other words, promote. From what you say,
though, this doesn't appear to be your problem.

The problem may be that after adding a book to the cart, the page
refreshes to itself. I know to look for the "Quantity in Basket" line,
but others may not. Consider making that larger (color, boxed, larger or
such). Or serve an interstitial page stating "We've added this product
to your shopping cart," with a choice of actions. Otherwise, the
shopper thinks nothing happened, considers the site broken, and leaves.

Here I see another major problem: Until this point, I didn't notice the
cart's top menu bar. And the "Checkout" link is as tiny as the rest, and
waaayyyyy off to the right. I suppose that's meant to make it obvious.
The effect is just the opposite.

(For the shopper not ready to check out, there are several awkward
moments here. If you can also offer the shopper a more obvious choice of
"next actions," that would be good, too. It's unlikely the visitor needs
to keep looking at the product they've already put in their cart. I
didn't notice the "product list" link, probably because I wasn't fully
in the mindset of a real shopper. But when I clicked on it later, I got
just a partial list of products. If your programmer is able to offer you
some navigation options at this point in the order process, explore
them.)

The words "Return to website" are also concerning -- as a user, I
thought I was *at* your website! Worse, it goes to
http://expertcommunications.com/index.html which doesn't exist. Your
home page ends with ".htm" not ".html." These are probably
controllable.

The checkout process itself seems entirely quick and straightforward
(except maybe for the location list defaulting to "Outside the U.S." but
no problem).

I didn't expect to complete my test order. I entered a mix of the word
"test' and my actual data, including the words Test Test for the card
name and a number that I believe Visa authorizes for test use. I was
VERY surprised that my order appears to have gone through. If the reason
for acceptance wasn't the number I used, I'd say that's a problem. I
forget what the post-order page was, but do remember it could use
improvement.)

Some of my suggestions are surely within the scope of your current
shopping cart and shouldn't be hard to fix. Before embarking on a major
upheaval, I'd try tweaking what you've got and test, test, test.

Best wishes,

Randy Rensch

=== N Y C L O C A T I O N =============================
Randall Rensch Marketing Communication Concepts... and copywriting
"Common Sense, Uncommonly Presented"
8355 Austin Street 4F, Kew Gardens, NY 11415 + 1 718-577-0005
randall_at_rensch.com www.rensch.com




Received on Mon Jun 27 2005 - 13:15:31 CDT