[ic] Adding to Cart

[Marty Tennison]

On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 19:57, gurs at sbcglobal.net wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Just a general non-programming questions.
> 
> Just recently I upgraded a commerce site. This site used to take you to the cart page 
> every time you added an item to it but now it keeps you on the same page and just 
> displays your cart (what buy-list does but we don't use buy-list) on the top of the page. 
> 
> Has anyone else tried using the second method on their site. Does make it easier for 
> the user or just confusing since no major ecommerce site does it this way.
> 
> When we implemented this we thought it would make it easier for the user but now I am 
> having second thoughts. Any comments?

www.barnesandnoble.com does this.  I've always thought it was pretty
slick and implemented it on a few sites.   It saves the customers from
having to click on "continue shopping" if they want to go shopping some
more.   

So for the customer who is going to add 1 item and checkout, it may be
one additional click after they click the buy button (ie go to cart). 
But for the customer who is going to add multiple items is saves them
having to click the continue shopping button a bunch of times.   I opted
to cater to the customer purchasing more items.  :)

We've been doing it this way for about a year and so far no complaints. 
But from examining the logs, it's clear that some customers just don't
get it.

One suggestion - if you keep them on the same page, make the "this item
added to your cart" portion of the page very very loud to catch the
customers attention.   Otherwise, if it is a subtle change, they tend to
miss it, especially if the page refresh is slow and they have a blank
page for a few seconds.

Hope that helps.

-- 
Marty Tennison <marty at sediva.com>