You see a product you want to buy and you click the button that says ‘Add to cart’. But what happens after that? Have you noticed? We found a bunch of different ways stores respond to the ‘Add to Cart’ button. Let’s start with some common online shopping customer personas to understand what they need better.

The Window Shopper

She heard about your site from a friend or clicked over from a Google ad. Has a bunch of other stores open in her browser too. Likes a couple of products and adds them to cart. Working within a budget so wants to know what it’s all going to add up to with a ‘Next-Day’ shipping plan.

The Grocery Lister

He has a list of maybe 10 products, maybe household, that he needs to stock up on. Open to looking at new brands or competitive buys. Definitely interested in super-saving deals and discounts. Adding multiple products in a session.

The Go Getter

She knows what she wants -size, colour, quantity. Just one product that needs to be purchased and that’s it.

You have one goal for all these cases – help them complete the checkout. What each of these use cases brings is a slight variation in need and expectation from the customer. Now it would be great if we could identify these shopper personas and serve custom shopping experiences for each of them but we can’t. How can we create a solid, intuitive ‘cart’ interaction that makes shopping seamless, from browsing to checkout?

You walk into a supermarket and pull up a shopping cart. You then spend the next half hour knocking things off your shopping list while giving that new cheese or flavored water a customary glance. Once you’re sure everything’s ticked off, you proceed to the cashier, pay for the stuff, bag it up and leave. Simple enough right? For many reasons though, shopping online is a lot harder than that. Question is– does it have to be?

With an online retail industry estimated to grow to $279 billion by 2015 in the US alone (source), 60% of online customers abandoning their carts is unacceptable. We discovered that flipping that figure around isn’t hard; if we’re willing to take small steps. Beginning with the release of Awesome Checkout, a smarter and simpler Magento extension, we’re determined to improve the online shopping experience. Not by reinventing it but by solving simple usability issues that could draw in that one flustered customer or seal that one see-sawing sale.

This is the start of a series of posts that will pick at one element of our shopping experience at a time. We’re going to research it, weigh it, explore it and hopefully even propose a better solution for it with your comments and feedback. Small steps towards a smarter e-commerce experience for shoppers and better conversion results for retailers. Win-Win.

In today’s online shopping experience, we believe that we ask our customers to make too many small decisions leading up to the big decision – will you buy a product from my store?

An article was written by Michael Lewis on President Obama’s theory of diminishing return. President Obama has completely eliminated the small decisions he has to make on a day to day basis – what to eat, what to wear, what time can he go exercise. He’s found that when you have to make more decisions throughout the day – the worse your decision making power gets. So when you eliminate the number of small decisions, you tend to make way better bigger decisions.

In our scenario, we want our customers to buy something from us. That’s the bigger decision. Whether it’s one product or more, we want the sale.

Our next few months will be dedicated to this idea that shopping carts can ask less and as a result convert more. By questioning each experience, we can determine what decisions we can make for the customer and what decisions the customer has to make.