لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Shopping Cart Guidelines
In a similar way to what happens in traditional supermarkets, online shoppers are given arepository to hold the product(s) to be bought. When items are added to a shopping cart, they are
listed on a special purpose page. This page must be easily retrievable at any time before checkout,
thus allowing the cart owner to modify the product listing before finalizing and submitting an
order.
Figure
14-5 presents the state diagram for the shopping cart conceptual model.
Figure 14-5: State diagram for
the shopping cart conceptual model (Markellou, 2001)
Shopping cart advantages are significant: quick and easy shopping experience, familiarity,
simplicity and clarity in the form of a stepwise process. Many e-Shops use a simplified shopping
cart version, known as persistent shopping cart[4],
which is visible from every page of the store and provides a quick way to constantly monitor the
shopping list status (contents and total cost).
The shopping cart metaphor makes customers intuitively understand the basic functionality
(Nielsen, 2000), in the sense that they are familiar with the way it operates. Despite its notable
success and wide acceptance, the shopping cart metaphor itself, may cause confusion. The operation
of editing the product quantities inside and that of making it zero in order to actually remove a
product is not a routine that we are accustomed to use in the real world reference system (i.e., in
a supermarket). Not to mention that in the real-life situation paying for the contents of our
shopping cart requires emptying the cart from its contents! Despite these problems, the shopping
cart is so widely used in online shops that high familiarity diminishes the incidents of such
“misuse.”Following, we provide a set of design guidelines that can dramatically increase shopping cart
effectiveness.
Cart Positioning and Representation
The shopping cart should be easy to find. Access, in terms of either viewing its page or
adding a specific product in it, should be provided from multiple points e.g., home page, product
pages, search page, etc. Experience has proven that a persistent view of the shopping cart on the
top right area of all e-Shop pages is very effective, since Web users look first at this area for a
link. In addition, a visual indication about whether the shopping cart contains products or not
(e.g., by changing icon or color as in
Figure
14-2), could be used as a reminder to the customer when browsing product pages or even
before heading to other sites, that there is a pending shopping list.
Cart Contents
On entering the cart users expect to see a listing of
all products they have selected while browsing the e-Shop’s merchandise. More specifically, for
each product it is recommended to include name and code, short description (when the name of the
product is either not available or not descriptive enough), quantity (number of items from the
product the user wishes to buy), current availability, and price. Special attention should be given
to providing a detailed analysis of the order total cost made up of all products in the cart.
Additional costs (shipping costs, other charges, and total cost) must be clearly analyzed and
justified in order to develop and establish a trustful and reliable relationship between the
shopper and the e-Shop. Moreover:
Navigation buttons and links should be labeled in a way that clearly indicates their effect
(i.e., where in the e-Shop the customer will be transferred when following one of them). All
interaction controls should state what they do from the user’s point of view. This should be
applied when deciding on the exact phrasing of tool-tips, button captions, graphics labels, and
hyperlink texts.
An empty shopping cart should provide shopping instructions (e.g., how to place items in the
cart, or how to recalculate the total cost).
On any error condition, clear and informative error messages should be provided in order to
enable users to resolve their problems quickly, thus increasing user satisfaction.
Primary Functionalities
As regards the basic functionalities that should be present in a shopping cart, balance is
essential: there should be neither too many options nor too few. The subset of must-have options
comprises: add item, remove item, empty shopping cart, change item quantity, recalculate total
cost, update shopping cart and proceed to checkout (Bidigare, 2000). In fact, cart updating (an
operation that practically recalculates the total cost) could be implemented as an automated
process that executes every time the user changes product quantities or shopping cart contents in
general. Multiple add and update buttons should be avoided because their excessive use may cause
confusion and usability problems. Moreover:
The names (or codes, in case there are no names available for the products) must be
hyperlinks pointing to the corresponding product page with the detailed description, features and
probably a photo. This way, users may easily refer to the details of each product. Other useful
links include information on the e-Shop return policy, guarantees, privacy policy and
security.
Customers should also be provided with the option to be transferred back to the page they
entered the shopping cart from, so shopping can be resumed (usually e-Shops provide a “return to
shopping” link for this purpose). This way the customer is prevented from feeling disoriented and
may keep on “walking the corridors” of the virtual market place exactly from the point he stopped
for a while, in order to take a product off the shelf and put it in the cart (just like in the
real-life situation, it is not natural to send the customer to the shop entrance after adding a
product to the cart!).
Last but not least, internationalization issues must be taken into account for currency,
shipping costs, credit cards, after sales support, language version of the product manual (where
applicable), product sizes (where applicable), etc.
Additional Tools and Options
In addition to the primary operations that should be supported by a shopping cart, there are
a number of extra tools and options that can upgrade the overall shopping experience. These
include:
Personal recommendations for related products (and/or highly rated products) that might
increase sales. Information from customers past purchases (history) or demographics could be used
for producing successful suggestions.
Option for saving the contents of the shopping cart in a “wish list” or in a shopping list
for future reference (some shopping carts support this capability for up to a certain time period,
usually 90 days).
Option for printing the contents of the shopping cart, along with their detailed pricing and
total cost.
Provision of a link to FAQ (frequently asked questions), help or customer support pages.
Addressing the questions of customers helps establish trustworthiness.
The list that preceded is probably not exhaustive, and on a case-by-case basis it could be
extended or restricted. Our objective though, is to give the reader the widest possible perspective
on what customers would like to see available in their shopping cart so as not to be pushed away
from the e-Shop, not to have difficulty consulting and updating it and not to feel lost,
disoriented, confused or even just not sure about the state of their buying process. The shopping
cart should make the user feel in control, at ease and reassured throughout the online
transaction.[4]Dack.com, Best Practices for Designing Shopping Cart and Checkout Interfaces. Available at:
http://www.dack.com/web/
