Website Usability Guidelines

Website Usability Shopping Carts

If you want to improve your online profits you must fine tune your shopping cart. Studies reveal that 65% of shopping carts are abandoned before an order can be placed.

Usability Testing - Even if you follow all of the usability standards you may still get a high abandonment shopping cart percentage. The only way to find out what works best for your website is to perform an A-B testing program on your shopping cart. We recommend that you have two separate shopping carts.

Server Logs - You will need to analyze your server logs to discover your true abandonment shopping cart percentage.

Target Abandonment Percentage - If you have a 30% abandonment shopping cart percentage you can be satisfied that your shopping cart is doing the job.

Customer Registration - Do not force your customer to register before you allow them to check out.

Shorten the check-out process - Users get frustrated easily with a shopping cart system that asks for huge amounts of duplicate information - as in forcing visitors to enter both billing and shipping addresses even if they're the same. By eliminating only one screen will drop abandonment rate by 12%.

Slow loading shopping cart forms - Shopping cart forms that process slowly irritate your visitors just as much as slow loading pages. Contact your hosting company if you have a slow loading shopping cart.

Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment

• 56% Shipping charges too expensive.
• 41% Item unavailable.
• 29% Shopping cart was too difficult to navigate.
• 21% The order would not go through due to credit limit.
• 18% Order form was too difficult to complete.
• 15% Unable to use coupons or discounts.