Almost for any eCommerce business creating an effective selling funnel is essential. Companies spend a significant amount of time shaping their funnels and making them smoother to encourage customers to buy. A shopping cart is an integral part of any selling strategy. Therefore, if you ask ‘Does cart design really matter?’ the answer is ‘Clearly yes.’
Many businesses overlook the importance of their shopping cart designs, focusing more on advertising, creating promotions, and special offers. However, according to Statista, only in March 2020 customers abandoned 88.05% of online shopping orders.
There can be many reasons why customers don’t complete their purchases, and one of them is ill-conceived purchasing steps. In this article, we explain why shopping cart design is important, share practical tips on how to create the best eCommerce cart, and specify what features to consider in your shopping cart when opting for eCommerce software development.
Reasons Why Shopping Cart Design is Important
There are a number of reasons why you need to care about your shopping cart design. Let’s have a closer look at some of them.
Adjustment for business needs
Various businesses have different selling strategies. Those companies that offer video games will sell differently from the ones that trade foods, cosmetics, or electroniс goods. Why so? The thing is buyers change their behavior when acquiring different types of products. Therefore, businesses have to adapt their selling funnels to their customers’ way of thinking.
For example, a shopper who buys clothes online would prefer to pay with a credit card, while business solution customers would use eWallets. As a result, businesses have to choose different payment methods in their shopping carts to meet their customers’ needs.
Clear checkout
Customized shopping cart design allows making checkouts smoothly and simpler. With clear step-by-step guidance, customers tend to complete their purchases more often. Therefore, it’s essential to pay attention to every shopping cart detail. For example, if the most important information is easily spotted, popping up messages are clear and not irritating to read, and others.
Building trust
A consistent UI is a way to build relationships of trust with customers. If a business decides to use an off-the-shelf shopping cart solution, its design may drastically differ from the rest of the company’s website. As a result, customers may think that they switched to a phishing website or got attacked by hackers and abandon the shopping process. Therefore, it’s essential that a shopping cart aligns with the company’s website or app and the business doesn’t lose its customers.
Revenue increase
When a business has its own site with a well-designed shopping cart, its layout attracts attention and focuses its users in the right areas. Placing products at the right place at the right time, adjusted graphics design, smooth product reviews, and their accurate description – all these add to the effectiveness of selling campaigns.
Ideas on How to Improve Your Shopping Cart
Many companies that want to build their own apps seek custom web application development services to create solutions that can satisfy specific business requirements and provide a personalized experience for their customers.
Software development companies can help to create a unique app’s UI design and adapt a shopping cart for the specifics of the selling funnel for a particular business. Here are some more ideas on how businesses can improve their shopping carts with custom web application development services.
#1 Make your CTA clear
When a customer is ready to buy and clicks a ‘Shopping cart’ button, your website should show him a clear way how to make a purchase. It can be done with the help of the Call-to-action (CTA) method. With this method, web designers encourage customers to buy by showing them which button to click next and which messages to read.
One webpage should have one or two CTAs, otherwise users can lose focus and get confused. Therefore, consider a customer’s way from the product catalog to the final purchase step and place your CTAs wisely along the way.
#2 Include a detailed product description
Detailed product description prevents customers from abandoning their shopping carts. Make sure that your customers get enough information on each product. If the description is too long, then you need to make clear summaries and place full information within one click from a product. Also, adjust thumbnail images for each product so that your customers could check their goods at a glance.
When customers can easily review their orders, they remember what items they want to buy and make the right decision faster.
#3 Follow the website design rules
Web designers have their own rules of how and where to place certain messages and buttons. These rules were established gradually and became a tradition over the years.
For example, back in the 90s Amazon placed the button of a shopping cart in the upper right corner of the page and since then its place has always been there. Many eCommerce sites follow the tradition and place their shopping carts in the same place. They do so to facilitate customer navigation around their sites. Therefore, to make your site easy to navigate, follow website design traditions and your customers won’t spend time searching for a ‘Buy’ button or a catalog.
#4 Add shopping cart notifications
The two simple things that can significantly enhance your customers’ experience are:
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displaying the number of items in the shopping cart
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confirming that the items are in a shopping cart.
When you add these notifications to your website you get your customers informed about their purchases. Now, they don’t need to ramble around the site just to check how many items they’ve already added to the cart.
Another thing that facilitates a purchase process is the mini cart. A mini cart is a pop-up window that displays the details about the items added to the cart. Customers don’t need to go to the shopping cart page or open it in a new tub to check their purchases.
All these features help customers to concentrate more on the goods they want to buy rather than shopping cart handling operations.
#5 Place information about shipping fees
Shipping fees are often added to the goods price and, as a result, often become a reason for customers to abandon their shopping carts. Moreover, if you put this information at the last step of the purchase process, it can irritate your customers as they spend much time placing their orders and at the end find out that the price is different.
To avoid possible misunderstandings, it’s a good idea to offer your clients free shipping. This way, you encourage customers to buy and they will feel fair about the prices of the goods.
#6 Include related goods
Make some room in your shopping cart for advertising. Presenting additional products to your customers is an easy way to increase their order value. To do this effectively, you need to evaluate product relationships and define which of them make the best complementary.
However, you may have thousands of products on your site, and to evaluate each one would be rather difficult. For this software development companies use Artificial technology algorithms. They help to estimate the preferences of each buyer and come out with the best product matches for effective adverts.
Conclusion
Shopping cart design plays a significant role in online sales. If shopping carts have a well-thought-out design and seamless selling funnel, they can increase a company’s revenue and minimize shopping cart abandonment.
To make their eCommerce sites effective many businesses refer to software development companies that offer custom web application development. These companies provide non-standard website solutions that can satisfy any business needs and have the best shopping carts designs for successful sales.
