Continuous Shopping

Another prime reason for originally developing the pop-up cart was to allow the user to "stay within the shopping experience." Again, this is a laudable goal on the surface. However, this needed to be balanced with the user's need for clarity and the needs for richer functionality and usability on a cart page.

Everyone agreed that it was necessary for the user to receive definitive feedback upon placing an item in his or her cart. Some sort of confirmation is necessary to indicate that the desired action has occurred. A pop-up window does accomplish this in some measure, but is not a very strong indicator. If the user clicks elsewhere in the main window, the pop-up is sent "behind" the main window and thus hidden from the user. Furthermore, a user may believe the pop-up to be an advertisement such as a cross-sell related to the item they just added to their cart. The probability that they will close this window before it loads seems fairly high for at least some consumers.

In the pop-up cart, after adding an item to the cart a user could choose to "Go To Checkout" or "Continue Shopping" (which simply closes the cart window). The pop-up window "floats" over the main window to allow a continuity of shopping. Although this sounds intuitive, data from several usability studies suggested that it may not have been accomplishing what we believed.

In many instances, the "Continue Shopping" button did not take users to where they expected. An example tested by the Nielsen/Norman Group involving the Jcrew website showed this problem quite clearly (NN Group, E-Commerce User Experience: Checkout & Registration, 2000). After placing a jacket into his cart, one user was annoyed that the shopping cart took him back to the same jacket page. He expected to return to the Men's directory instead. How likely is it that he would purchase another jacket? Not at all likely. The most likely clickstreams (i.e., methods of clicking successive links to navigate the site) would be to use prominent cross-sell links or persistent (i.e., appearing on every page) navigational links.

In Information Architecture of the Shopping Cart (Bidigare, S., 2000), the fourth most important point to include in a shopping cart is the display of related products. We were limited in this ability within a pop-up cart because of screen real estate. In one version of the pop-up cart, we tried using a small banner cross-sell. However, as discussed previously, users tend to overlook anything that looks like an advertisement. Our own research showed that a pictorial cross-sell (i.e., using thumbnail photos along with a cross-sell) increased our effectiveness in this area.

Our own research supported the idea that users preferred to have related items (cross-sell) displayed both on the product/item page as well as in the cart. One user described this as "swinging through the jungle, vine to vine, without having to go back to a previous vine." This seems like a pretty apt analogy. With cross-sell items only on a product page, the user has to go back to the previous product page to go forward to the next product (assuming that adding an item to the cart loads a new page). With the expanded screen real estate available with a full page shopping cart, we were able to better accomodate this feature.

We also discovered that users often wanted to be able to add a related item to their cart immediately without going to that item's specific page. Users would often research several items before they began placing items in their carts. We incorporated the ability to allow additional items to be added directly from the cart page, thus eliminating yet another step (i.e., pogo-sticking between item pages and the cart for cross-sell items). For users that want more information before purchasing, links to detailed product information were also provided.