Website Usability Guidelines

E-Commerce Shopping Cart (1 of 4)

Follow these recommendations:

Shopping Cart Testing - Even if you follow all of the shopping cart 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 you have two separate shopping carts.

Shopping cart usability is essential to the success of your online business, so you should always test early and often.

There's more to testing than just checking the HTML code for errors. True usability testing gets actual users in front of your site so you can evaluate their user experience.

Of course you can use the site because you designed it. But can your visitors order your products, input information, and complete their transactions? You need to know that before you launch, not after!

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.

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

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.