Shopping Cart Tips For Web Conversions

This morning, I was giving a potential customer advice on his shopping cart (so I had to do it without the benefit of his analytics — always tough.) I gave him five ideas, and realized that just about everyone who does e-commerce could use them, so here they are:

1) Next to the email address, on the shopping cart, have a link that says, “We take your privacy seriously.” That should like to your privacy policy. People like to be reassured at just the right moment.

2) Make your final ordering button say, “Place my secure order” or “Submit my secure order.” It would be even nicer if it had a little icon of a lock on it. Again, people like to be reassured at just the right moment. I find myself looking at the HTML to be sure that it is a secure cart, but not everyone is in the web business and knows what to look for.

3) Give the customer the option of just checking a box to ship the order to the same address as the credit card.

4) If you can, reduce your shopping cart to one page. Every click is a chance to bail out.

5) Put a thumbnail picture in the shopping cart next to each product that the customer is purchasing. Studies show that product photos in the shopping cart increase checkouts.

Robbin
Lunametrics