We have been doing a lot of work on a few sites with heavy loads to streamline the process. One thing we notice is most merchants keep the trip to the cart in place for every product add.

Well this causes a lot of additional page loads and work for the server in order to take the extra trip every time. It is page loads, viewstate loads (forward and back) and rendering the cart each time. If you're tracking inventory, the toll is that much greater. So, using this method on the average store - for 10 items in the cart it is 30 additional page loads, and over 200 additional DB calls.

I think in MOST cases it is unnecessary, and actually bad for the shopping experience. Now before you rip me apart, every site is unique and there are exceptions to every rule, so in your case it may be the better to go to the cart every time. I believe that 90 times out of 100 it isn't.

I really hate analogies but think of this.

From the user/shopper

You head out to target to get a few things. I want a digital camera, spare batteries, extra memory, and some paper for the printer.

So I head out to the camera dept. I spend a while looking at the models, make a choice and throw one in the cart and - BAM! - I'm teleported to the checkout line in the front of the store?

Well now I have to go back into the store and look for the memory (which was actually on the shelf below the cameras!) Depending on the store (ecomm or B&M) it may take some work to get back there again and I may not even bother.

Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

From the store/marketing

We all know why the milk is at the back corner of the store right? The B&M's figured out many years ago, the longer shoppers spend in the store in minutes and the longer they travel through the store in distance (they actually measure this in feet) the more they add to their cart ie. SPEND.

We don't have to spend the millions the big guys did to figure this out, it's actually pretty easy to paint by numbers.

Keep the people IN THE STORE, don't send them into the cart until you're ready to say good bye.

Now I don't care what you have for a server or servers, there is a finite amount of resources available to service your store, just like in a B&M. A retailer would not add a step that could possibly get you out of the store faster, nor would they spend a penny unnecessarily on resources that are not required.

Case in point we have a merchant that is running on two dedicated servers right now that asked us to look at the flow of things to see where speed could be improved as well as provisioning additional servers to handle the load. Well they should have MORE than enough already to handle the load, so we leaned towards finding the bottlenecks. Long story short, by removing this unnecessary trip to the cart on every product added to the cart the servers are flying again, the application is stable and there is no need to add any additional servers. It's too soon to definitively say that sales have also increased due to the chage but it sure looks that way so far. We'll know a lot better in a month or so after some new trends are established.

So to cart or not to cart?.........

Staying with Target, they (around here) have multiple checkouts: one at the front of the store, one in the electronics department, and one in the pharmecy area.

Perhaps they found that people buying medications and electronics want to grab one thing be done. And the thought of having to wait through the potentially long lines up front led to abandoned carts.

Maybe this is a model worth mimicing: some categories or products take you straight to checkout while others leave you by the milk.

"Would training a user to use the website one way....only to have it 180 during the same session be a dead end?"

Probably. I suspect the physical analogy breaks here.

But maybe it is a useful concept that just needs a different implementation. Like 2 buttons, "Add to Cart" and "Hand to Clerk and Get Me Out Of Here!" ("Buy Now" might be better for the 2nd button since people may have come to associate "Buy Now" with immediate checkout systems like PayPal and Google).


Another option (may require training) is to drag-and-drop the item onto a cart or onto a cash register.

"Add To Cart" + "Buy Now & Checkout" buttons.


Would you expect to be sent to the Cart Page or skip it and go right to the checkout process (be it account creation or 1 step checkout)?



Hey Carl, the clients cover the gamut for one-and-done & multiple item carts. Really depends on the market, but I think that's an easy way out... if enough time & effort is placed into each store you know there would be more multi-item orders.



Brings me to off-topic feature that I've been hoping to see... the "spend only $XXX.XX more to qualify for free shipping" on the cart page (or ATC Notification)

If you tweak the inertial dampers & modulate the atomic decoder you'll get less of the BAM when teleporting...

You see John, it's the constant product improvements that make it fun working you.

I just spit coffee all over my screen - that was a good one!


Carl:

In this case it was all about the page loads per customer (primarily the redundant trips back and forth from the cart) that was adding a lot of overhead. The customer averages 10 items in their cart so the server and customer was dealing with an average 30 more page loads than needed.

Matt, Andy - Good points as always.

Most of the studies I read (and a lot of internal research) shows that we are not dealing with a "new-to-ecomm" customer nearly as much as we were years ago. It looks like about 1 in 7,000-8,000 are a "first time ecommerce shopper". So rules we follow now are a lot more age demographic centric, than newbie centric when it comes to usability and flow.

With this in mind, customers (most) understand that when you put things in your cart, that is what happens and when you want to get out of there you find/hit the checkout button. I think a mini-cart control is useful and as always, good core navigation - and if you are skipping the trip to the cart page on product add, leave some visual indicator that it was added to your cart.

So far, all indications on this store is sales and carts are up and the server is running about 30% less on the resources. The time per session is way down, so that is clearly something that has changed. It will be another couple months to really see the big picture but so far it looks like a really good change for this store.

"Item has been added to cart" isn't a site term (or is it?) in SP2. Is it in SP3.1?

Either way, I'd like to clean this up. Anyone know where this term is?

I like the idea of not going to the cart everytime a customer clicks "add to cart", but what i also like is when a product has accessories and it re-directs the customer to a page before the cart with all the accessories for that product. It makes the product page less cluttered with products that have 5 or more accessories.

How do you display your crosssales / accessories when you don't cart? We have about 10 accessories for customers to choose from and I wouldnt know how to display them when you don't cart...

I guess id have to see an example of how to have heavy usage of crossells/accessories to see how i could implement it in our site... I really like the idea of "not to cart" and think it would benifit our buisness a lot, but our accessories are also really important as well.