2009 is going to be the year of the online shopping cart. Internet Christmas trading was up, despite the economic downturn, continuing a year-on-year trend of shoppers flocking to online stores for convenience.

But not all online stores are built equal. A badly designed shopping cart or poor understanding of online customer wants and needs can lose you sales. As more businesses launch online this year, minor mistakes can become major headaches as consumer choice causes potential customers to flow to the competition.

So what are the biggest crimes against ecommerce an online store can make?

1. Overcomplicating the process

Too many clicks or pages between a purchasing decision and final confirmation can give the customer too many chances to reconsider and back out of the sale. Customers want to click a button, see their item has been added to the cart, and move swiftly on to more shopping. And, to be honest, that’s what you want, too.

Don’t overcomplicate the sale by forcing further items at them before confirming their choice. Taking the customer to a page that has the sole purpose of showcasing products they may want to add before confirming the item they have already decided upon is the online equivalent of “Do you want fries with that” and can be very irritating for the online shopper. Plus, this gives the customer a chance to reconsider before confirming their original purchase.

There are some sites that do offer additional recommendations within the checkout process, including Amazon. But where these sites succeed is in having a highly intuitive shopping cart system that generates recommendations from millions of possible choices that are usually extremely close to the personal tastes of the consumer. For example, the Amazon system records every product I view within their site and ‘learns’ the types of products I would be most likely to be interested in purchasing. This is complex stuff. If you’re not Amazon and can’t guarantee that same level of intuition within your own system, don’t do it.

A simple purchase is enhanced by as few clicks as possible. There should be one click to add to the cart and – once the customer has selected all their desired items - a simple process to finalise the purchase.

2. Using a “Buy” button instead of “Add to Cart”

A good shopping cart should encourage multiple sales within the one transaction. Using a shopping cart button that prompts the customer to ‘Buy’, rather than simply ‘Add to Cart’, puts the sales pressure at the wrong ends of the transaction. After all, when you push a shopping cart around a supermarket, you aren’t pressured to pay for each item as you pull it off the shelf.

A ‘Buy’ button implies an instant purchasing commitment that can backfire in two ways. Firstly, a customer may be hesitant to immediately commit to buy, preferring to set items aside in a shopping cart to consider. Secondly, by encouraging the customer to buy straight away, you are pushing for a single transaction rather than encouraging multiple purchases at the one time.

You want the customer to freely add items to their cart – playing with the idea of having as many of your items as possible. When they finish choosing items and move to their checkout screen, you can then change your language to close the sale on the combined total of these items.

3. Forcing the customer to finalise payment too early

When customers add an item to their carts, some systems take them automatically to the shopping cart page to view the final transaction. This encourages customers to finalise their transaction immediately, reducing multiple purchases, whilst irritating those who have to find a way to navigate back to search for further items.

Why not add a simple shopping cart widget to your store that appears on one side of the screen. You can confirm the item has been added to the cart – even display a running tally – whilst the customer stays in the products area, happily clicking on further items.

4. Failing to have shipping costs up front

Shopping cart abandonment is a major issue in online commerce, with many customers deciding against the purchase at the last possible stage. The most common reason for this is that many online stores only display the shipping costs on the selected items at this last stage, dramatically adjusting the customer’s idea of the bargains they were about to purchase by inflating the final cost.

If it isn’t possible to have detailed shipping information on each product page (as there are so many possible international permutations) at least allow the customer to see an estimate of their shipping in their shopping cart at the earliest stage possible.

5. Not discounting postage on multiple purchases

You and I both know that sending multiple items together in one package is cheaper at the post office. So why don’t some online stores reflect this when calculating combined postage amounts?

Ensuring a discount is offered and automatically calculated by your shopping cart software can definitely fuel further sales. If a customer can see that adding a further book to their order only adds a dollar to their postage bill, they will see the advantage in buying now rather than returning later to buy it in a separate transaction. They may even go searching for another book in your store just to maximise the convenience of the transaction. Remember, this discount doesn’t cost you anything as you are merely passing on the discount you get at the post office.

6. Requiring registration before accessing the cart

Don’t restrict your customers from creating the desire to purchase your products. If you force a customer to register before being able to place an item into a shopping cart, you run the risk of driving them away. Allow them to see the savings, play with the combinations, experience your combined shipping discounts and fantasise about buying your wonderful things. Only require registration when they are finalising their transaction. At that point, they are interested enough to want to complete the information. Before this point, you haven’t created the motivation for them to spend the time completing boring forms.

Oh, and always remember to keep registration forms as simple as possible, while only asking for information that is necessary to complete the transaction. Do not use the opportunity to ask survey questions, seek demographic information or otherwise add additional text boxes and pages of clicking if it can be avoided. The more work you ask of your customers, the less likely they are to complete it.

7. Forgetting GST variables

GST can be complicated for businesses at the best of times, but when an online store can potentially attract customers from around the world, you need to ensure your shopping cart can offer both full and GST free prices for your different customers. Also, it is a legal requirement to enable the printout of a complete GST invoice, so your shopping cart software needs to support this feature.

8. Inflexibility

A good business future-proofs itself, meaning the technology decisions they make today take into account their future needs as well. You may want to migrate your online store from one hosting provider to another in the future. Imagine the costs involved in having to rebuild from scratch, with the related downtime and loss in sales, if your new hosting setup is not compliant with your cheap, legacy website.

Therefore, it is important to choose a shopping cart technology that is compliant with all hosting systems.

9. Requiring complex written instructions to use

If the functionality of your shopping cart requires explanatory text to explain how items are added or deleted, your cart is too complicated. A shopping cart should be instinctive in its layout and behaviour. If you need to explain what the icons mean, your customers will not appreciate having to learn your own unique setup when other online stores are simple to use.

10. Out of stock

You’ve finally found the product you’ve been searching the net for. Happily, you put it into your shopping cart and fill out the information to buy the item. Suddenly, on the last page of the payment process, you are notified that the item is out of stock.

Shopping Carts that process information on the back-end like this have very little understanding of the customer. Make sure your own shopping cart doesn’t promote disappointment and instead provide stock information either on the product page or immediately on adding to the cart.

A good shopping cart will transform the ‘Add to cart’ button to an ‘Out of Stock’ button when the item is unavailable, so as not to mislead a customer. It may be a good idea to allow for pre orders so a customer can indicate their interest once new stock has been received.

Trial and Error

As complex as online stores and shopping carts may seem, with the right application you can control and adjust all the above features with ease. Quite often, a bit of trial and error is needed to find the optimum configuration for your target market.

Is there a particular colour scheme that attracts the eye better? Are different words or button designs more or less effective? What about experimenting with price points and shipping to find the combination that appeals the best?

All these changes and modifications can be carried out with just a few button clicks and the results monitored within the right online store application. Instead of paying for expensive redesigns every time you want to make a change, using a shopping cart application like StoreXpress gives you the power to make changes, track results and administer stock without massive bills.

2009 is the year of the shopping cart. It could also be your year too. What are you waiting for?

About the Author

Jonathan Crossfield is the Marketing Communications Manager for Netregistry. He is a regular contributor on internet business to Nett Magazine and also produces a successful blog on writing.

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