Every magento checkout asks the user the following:

1. Do you have an account? Yes, then sign in here.
2. Don’t have an account? Then register to create a new one.

Do we really need all these options when we as the e-commerce site owners know if the user has an account?

Being online, we don’t have to memorize who our customers are. Our computer brains tell us. So, when we built Awesome Checkout, we threw out these 3 questions. And simply asked the user to enter their email address.

If they have an account, we grey everything out and ask the user to enter in their password.

If they don’t have an account, we just let them proceed to filling out the rest of their details.

This should be the new norm: tap into everything your customers have already told you. It just makes the experience they go through more customized and more tailored. The less options customers have, the less you make them repeat themselves, the more likely they’ll stick around and buy something.

Think that’s cool? You should check out the rest of the smart things we’ve put in Awesome Checkout.

The post Less Options People, Less Options! appeared first on Anatta Design.

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?

The post Add to Cart (Part I): What your customer really wants appeared first on Anatta Design.

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.

The post Small steps, Better shopping appeared first on Anatta Design.

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.

The post Do We Ask Our Customers Too Much? appeared first on Anatta Design.

Today’s release covers the following:

• Totally new design: Uses a tab instead of 3rd column now
• Accuracy improved: even more in data tracking in case of cart merges
• Tracking exclusion feature: admin side logins exclude your checkouts to be tracked and doesn’t pollute real data of the customers

This new release is based on all the feedback we’ve gotten from our users. If you want more features or improvements you want included in the next release, please comment below. We’re going to start our next sprint in the coming weeks ….

The post v1.1 Of My Abandoned Carts Released appeared first on Anatta Design.

[City], [State]  [Zip Code] = Oakland, CA  94629-2231

It’s worth asking, does that format work online?

The Norm

It makes sense for mail clerks and postmen to have the zip code in one consistent, easy-to-find place: the end. We carried a pattern over to web forms because it’s what people are used to doing and it reduces the chance of errors. But, in a world where we can deduce information and categorize relationships into tables, there’s a better way.

Making the Web Smarter

There are now open-source databases that describe the relationship between zip codes and their respective city and state values. This means you can figure out what a user’s city and state are with just their zip code. You can’t do it the other way around because there are multiple zip codes for every city/state, but there is only one city and state for every zip code.

Using the Information You Have

With the information that comes from these geographical data files (XML) or web services, you can now auto-fill (via Ajax) the user’s city and state form fields once they enter their zip code. You do a lookup for the city/state based on the zip code entry through your XML file. As soon as you find the entry, use it. This eliminates the need of ever forcing your user to type in information you already know.

Conclusion

We like to look at it this way: The less time users spend on your web forms, the more chance they have of completing the transaction. Whether it’s signing up for a newsletter or buying a product. If its easier to do and requires less work, people will engage deeper. And that means you just upped your conversion rates!

To get started using zip code auto-fill and other awesome funnel shortcuts, check out Awesome Checkout.

The post What’s in a Zip Code? appeared first on Anatta Design.

The reason you might have more than one of each file type is because:

• your developer wanted to organize all the CSS and JS into separate files so it’s easier to work on them
• your developer wanted to use multiple library types to satisfy your requirements
• you used multiple developers and each wanted to work without having to learn the other’s code

Why does the number of CSS or JS files matter?

Because each time you ask for another file, you’re causing the server to take an action. And every request causes a delay. So the more files you ask for, the slower your site loads for the end user.

How does a developer stay organized while maximizing on load time?

Your developer can keep using more than one version of each file when coding. But when he’s done, he should combine all of them together and reference that single file. It’s really that easy.

How much does this affect my site speed?

It all adds up. So this simple practice could shave anywhere from a few milliseconds to a full half second based on how bad it is. And when you’re trying to convince users your site is where they need to be, every second they get to read your site the better!

This post is part of a recurring feature, “Speed Check.” To catch the next one, subscribe to our mailing list below or follow us on Twitter.

The post Count your CSS and JS files appeared first on Anatta Design.

To start off, a code refactoring means the developer wants time to clean the codebase of the following:

• non-extendable code: he wrote some code which works but has friction when it comes to write more code with & on top of that code
• duplicate code: he wasn’t sure if code was already written so some function, classes, or parts of them were written twice
• non-optimized code: he wrote something that works as intended but is not optimized for performance, meaning with further efforts we can improve the performance of code
• core hacks: he made modifications to the code directly that should never be touched when dealing with a CMS or framework or a web platform like WordPress or Magento

If you’re thinking about the long run, these all sound like great things for the developer to. You want him to optimize his process and you want your code to be better. But the thing about refactoring that developers get wrong is that it’s not supposed to be a phase of development where you set time aside for it, it doesn’t mean taking away time from bugs you need fixed and functionalities you want to build.

Refactor early, refactor often. One should refactor as soon as possible and as early as possible. This means one should iterate on code in small intervals refactoring it while developing it. But the question left to still answer is if he does clean up your code, what do you get in return? Is it worth it?

Ability to Extend Code

Organizing code in a way that it doesn’t come in way of extending it further when feature requests or changes come in, is a serious win. This saves time as if the code wasn’t extendable, it will involve rewriting some existing code so as to support the code for new feature or modification.

Quicker Changes

When code is efficient and organized well, it can be manipulated and expanded by a developer more easily. So if you want to change how a feature works (small changes, not crazy big changes), the developer can do this in less time than if the code were messy. For websites and online businesses trying to be more agile with their development cycles, this could have a big impact on how quickly your features go from idea to live functionality.

Quicker Bug Fixes

The same goes for bug fixes. When you have cleaned up code, it’s easier for your developer or an outside consultant to debug new issues as they arise. They can isolate the functions causing the problem and then go through that function line by line to see where it’s going wrong.

Quicker Upgrades

If you’re using a CMS of any type (i.e. WordPress), a prebuilt e-commerce solution (ie. Magento), or just a popular framework (Ruby on Rails), you’re frequently upgrading to the latest version of the software. If your functionality, however, is built on code that’s has hacked the core, you’re in for a nightmare. An upgrade should be painless — something that happens in an hour and minimize the chances of breaking anything. Code refactoring allows for that.

If your developer really wants dedicated time to refactor, find out what he wants to do exactly and what it impacts. Even if the developer inherited someone’s else codebase, the right way to maintain that is to refactor it by bits & bits over several iterations. If it’s just cleanup without the intention of making bug fixes, changes, and upgrades faster, check with us. We’ll help you determine if it’s really worth it. [contact us link]

The post The Code Refactoring Fuss appeared first on Anatta Design.

Every users’ browsing environment is different. You can’t trust the results you experience alone. You might have a fiber optic connection and your users a cable connection. You might be at home and your customers at work behind a company firewall. You are visiting your site regularly so you’ve already got certain components cached but that’s not the case for new visitors.

Sure, you can install a bunch of developer tools on your browser. But what if you’re not a developer? What if you just want a simple way to see how you’re doing so you can know how you can improve?

There are a handful of 3rd-party services that give you insight on how your site loads and let you diagnose your speed issues. We like:

http://www.webpagetest.org/

It’s super simple. You enter your site URL and the location of where you want to look at the site from. In order for this to work, you’re gonna have to run this test more than once — from different locations and with different internet connections.

Use this test over other things your developer might suggest, because it’s impartial. Unlike those tools, Webpagetest replicates what your visitors experience — not what your developer experiences. When your developer makes enhancements that are supposed to streamline speed and load times, check again using this or similar tools.

That’s how we made certain our client’s site www.cleanprogram.com cut it’s load time (from 7.617 seconds to 3.313 seconds) as a result of our new service, Monk Temple. We had to be impartial to prove that it works. And so should you.

For more about Webpagetest, visit their website.

To see how Monk Temple can help you pick up the pace, click here.

The post How fast is your store, really? appeared first on Anatta Design.

Long time back, we would always create animations by using Flash ActionScript. It’s transitioned since those days to Javascript. But with the launch of CSS3, so many things can be done from CSS alone. Animations with CSS3 can make your site come to life in very subtle ways.

Today, I want to showcase one one CSS3 property {transition} that can make filling out forms a really nice user experience.

I remember a few months back we were working on our product AwesomeCheckout. There was some kind of auto fill functionality for text fields in the form. State and country fields were to get filled as soon as the user enter his zip code. It was working fine but we felt something was missing from the user experience.

So, Nirav and I spoke and we felt to add an animation so that the change user can feel that the values in state and country fields are getting filled after entering his zip code. At that time, we implemented this CSS3 property and it turned out really nice.  


Here is the live example that you can not only try out, but even take the code to make it work for you: http://jsfiddle.net/ZpSSv/3/

The post CSS3 Animation For Autofill appeared first on Anatta Design.