Tanner Larsson  0:07  

Alright, so today we’re going to talk about how not to do a shopping cart. Now the shopping cart on your store is the second most important page as this page is closest to the money besides the checkout. The Checkout is the absolute most important page on your store because it actually collects the money. One step removed from that is the shopping cart. And if your shopping cart sucks, you don’t get the Proceed to Checkout, you don’t get the Initiate checkout, and you have a massive level of abandonment. So let’s jump over and look at a shopping cart that’s all jacked up and something you want to make sure your cart looks nothing like. 

 

Tanner Larsson  0:36  

Alright, let’s hop over. So here we are in the shopping cart of King Ice. We talked about this store a few videos back. But anyway, this is top 25 in terms of traffic, Shopify stores, so they’re getting a lot of traffic to their store. And their cart is all kinds of jacked up. Now, I’m not saying this to be mean to them. King Ice is obviously a good brand, they’re doing something right. But they’re certainly not optimizing their store the way it should be. They haven’t done a lot of user testing, they haven’t actually done anything with this cart, except make it harder for the customer to purchase. So what I’m going to show you right now is I’m going to pick this cart apart, telling you all the things that need to be improved, changed, or whatever. And where that information is coming from, is not me, I’m not making it up. It’s coming from my team. We have over 40 Different full-time revenue optimization experts who do nothing but e-commerce optimization all day, every day, 365 days a year, all we do is optimize, all we do is run split tests, look at the data. And we’re running 30 to 40 major tests a week. So we have a massive amount of data, in fact, over $400 million worth of test data, supporting what I’m about to tell you. 

 

Tanner Larsson  1:54  

So let’s look at this cart. And let me tell you all kinds of stuff that’s going on. And when I point out something that’s not right, or different, or whatever, think about it in your store, go look at your cart. Is your cart making these same mistakes? Because I’m telling you, the abandonment rate of your cart does not have to be as high as it is, you can drop that abandonment rate significantly. So you get a much higher reach checkout and a much higher initiate checkout, simply by dialing in your cart. 

 

Tanner Larsson  2:21  

So here we go. First things first. There’s a timer up on the left-hand side. All right, saying your cart is reserved for so many minutes. Okay, this is designed to be a scarcity tactic in order to get people to move forward in the process. All right. Now, if you do have high inventory fluctuation, or inventory sells out really quick and you’re selling a lot of volume on a particular item. You can do this, but you should tell the user Why don’t just say your cart is reserved for this many minutes without telling them why, explain to them. And really, that’s about the only reason now we used to use this scarcity a lot. We tested all kinds of different types of scarcity in the cart and things like that. The only time we use it now is if there is an inventory issue with that product or with the specific products. If the product sells so quickly, and we’re making 1000s of sales a day, and having it sit in a cart may cause the product to show sold out when there are actually products in the cart, then we will put a timer on it. That helps offset that. Otherwise, we don’t use it. 

 

Tanner Larsson  3:29  

The next thing, social icons, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and whatever this sucker is Snapchat. Let’s think about this, you just paid more than likely through advertising on Facebook or a social platform to drive this person to your site to buy something. And then you want to give them away to easily go back to the social media site and abandon the purchase? No, you definitely do not want to give them an opportunity to go to social sites, off the cart, not without actually manually typing it in, don’t make it easy for him to abandon. Plus, there’s another concept here called cognitive load. And that is the amount of stuff the brain has to process in order for it to get through the page and actually take the action you want them to take. If you look at this, there’s a lot of stuff going on on this page. So not only should the social signals be gone, but also all that top-level navigation should not show up. In the cart, you should have no other links out of the cart except for the Proceed to Checkout button or the continue shopping button. Those should be the only links in this thing besides clicking the logo which takes them back to the homepage. Everything else should be done. So they should suppress in your cart, all the navigation links or additional shopping links or any of that stuff. No search bars, nothing like that. The goal of the cart One thing. That’s to get him to click the Proceed to Checkout button. It’s not to get him to do anything else, just that one thing. And right now there’s so much stuff going on here. In fact, they can’t even see the Proceed to Checkout button because it’s below the fold of the page. And I’m on a 26-inch monitor. So there’s a lot of crap going on in this cart. 

 

Tanner Larsson  5:21  

So the next thing it says bag, what the heck is a bag? If you look at the other video I did for King Ice, it’s very confusing. They say bag here, but up in the top left, it says cart. Right here in the breadcrumb navigation, it says your shopping cart. But now I have a bag. Okay, this should say shopping cart or cart at the very least, not a bag. Also, there should be actually two Add to Cart buttons, one above the cart and one below the cart. There’s only one on this page, they’re missing that as well. Going down. Let’s look at their quantity. Let’s see if that updates. Okay, so this is good. The cart does update automatically with quantity, that’s very important. And the subtotal offered updates. Come over here to the bottom, special instructions for the seller. This is a stock Shopify thing. Now, does this get used? Yes. From our test results and test data. It’s an outlier. It’s literally a tiny percentage or fraction of a percentage of people that actually use the special instructions for sellers. And a lot of times, it’s something like shipped to this name, or whatever else, which should be done in the shipping information field anyway, it’s not needed. If you’re doing some kind of print on demand or customizable product. Typically, you’re handling that customizable input on the product page. So this field should be suppressed, it should be turned off and not activated. There’s no reason for it to be there. So get rid of that. 

 

Tanner Larsson  6:51  

Moving over to the other side, we got the subtotal, which is good. It should say subtotal, not total. And then they’re using Sezzle. So it shows that you can get it for payments. That’s all right. Then it says shipping and taxes calculated at checkout that are already known, there’s no reason to bring that to their attention. So that should also be suppressed. The next thing is, why are you giving me a discount code field in my cart? When the checkout has one built-in, and that’s when you apply the discount code before your credit card information before you checked out, not in the cart. So again, one more thing that’s confusing. And then it says you have a discount code field here where you can enter your discount code and click the button to apply it. And then right underneath it is another button that says Update bag. What do I need to update the bag for? Typically an update bag means an update cart, and then an old-fashioned cart with low tech. When you change the quantity, try to remove an item or do anything in the cart, you would have to click update the cart to get it to populate. Except we already saw that if I click quantity, this cart updates, so it’s automatically updating. So what the heck is this update bag button for other than a waste of real estate and a point of confusion for the shopper. Also bag, what the frick is a bag? I’m looking for a cart, everything else says cart. And then as we scroll down, by clicking the checkout, you agree to the Terms of Service and the return policy. We’re in the cart, guys, this is not a checkout, when they click this button, they’re not checking out, what’s happening is they are proceeding to checkout. They’re in the cart, and they’re going to the checkout, not checking out. So this is a false positive here. And you’re actually clicking this Checkout button, which is not an actual Checkout button or from by legal standards that clicking that button is not in agreement to a terms of service or return policy, because there is no name, email, or identifiable information attached to it. So that’s fake and causing more confusion. Why are they doing this? Why? Because they don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to this. This should say proceed to checkout and have an arrow pointing to the right. Because our brains are trained to do that. And that should be a vibrant color, like blue. This should not even be here. This should not even be here. 

 

Tanner Larsson  9:19  

And then below it are the payment icons. That’s okay. You can have payment icons here. But another button that says more options, what kind of options I don’t even know. Let’s click what happens. Oh my gosh. Now it’s popping up payment options below the Checkout button, which is below the update bag button, which is below the coupon code button, which is below all this other stuff. Talk about a confusing shopping cart. Very confusing. This is not optimized guys. Now, this is probably one of the worst examples I’ve seen in a very, very long time. So chances are your cart probably doesn’t look this bad. But chances are you’re probably missing a lot of the things that I talked about here or doing some of these things that you shouldn’t be doing. 

 

Tanner Larsson  10:03  

Let’s talk about this more options thing. Look at this, the cognitive load here to figure out what is going on is massive. And the hierarchy of focus is all messed up, which means the hierarchy of focus is what should the customer focus on at any one point, okay, there’s one main focal area, one main hierarchy of focus on every page, that would be the button, which button there are six buttons, not counting the apply button that makes seven, seven buttons to choose from, which one’s the right one? Also, they’re using third-party payment options here, like PayPal, and Amazon pay, which obviously says all there, but Sezzle should be added at the end anyway. The same thing with PayPal and Amazon pay, you should not have any payment information or payment options in the cart, they need to go to the checkout. The actual checkout not this button, that’s not the checkout, they need to proceed to the checkout. And they need to fill in the Customer Information page, all payment icons or payment options should be suppressed, they shouldn’t show up on the cart or the checkout page, either the customer information page or the checkout, they should be suppressed there as well and only show up when they get to the Payment Information page which happens after they choose their shipping information. And at that point, there’s a radio button where they can select Credit Card PayPal, Amazon pay or Cecil, that’s the way to do this. This is a terrible execution of a shopping cart. And I guarantee you if King Ice gave us an hour with their shopping cart, we could make a massive improvement in their conversions and their revenue simply by fixing the cart, not to mention all the other stuff going on on their site. This we could fix in a heartbeat like that. 

 

Tanner Larsson  11:44  

So guys, take a look at everything I’ve shown, watch this video again, look at your cart, and make sure you’re not making the same mistakes. And if you want to know how to optimize the rest of your store, watch these two videos right here. And then also click the links below to subscribe and then also click the notification icon which is that little bell to make sure that you get notified when we release a new video. Alright, guys, I’ll see you in the next video.