Article > Shopping Carts
 

Not All Shopping Carts Are Created Equal

You've got two main concerns when thinking about having a shopping cart for your website.

1) It should be easy for the search engines to index your product and descriptions.

2) it should be easy to navigate and very user friendly for the buyer to find and buy your products.

So let's start with number 1.  For search engines to be the most dynamic are usually built in .php. This is a very dynamic and secure type of shopping cart. However, many if not most of them have very short comings. Some actually tout that they are "Search Engine Friendly" yet the pathways are so filled with #,/,?,x987t?345% that the search engines can't read them so they simply move on..

One shopping cart we found that said that their shopping cart pages were 100% SEO friendly. For each page, you could create different title tags, h1 and h2 tags, create keyword density within the descriptions, alt tags for the images etc.

Now that is a great optimized page especially for a shopping cart but what they FAILED TO REALIZE, was that the search engine robots could not read the long extensive pathways so they could not even get to the shopping cart page to index it. This is very much like "Fools Gold"  It looks and seems real but the value is truly worthless.

A great pathway may look like this...  "http://www.yourdomainname.com/cart/tshirt/ts#10921.html"

However most carts show a pathway like this...
"http://www.yourdomainname.com/cart.php?m=product_list&c=12" (THIS CANNOT BE READ BY THE SEARCH BOTS)

So if you want super dynamic shopping cart features... you may have no choice, however if you want the best chance at having all of your items indexed by the search engines, you have to give the indexing search bot a chance to at least get to the page...

Now lets talk about number 2, What a buyer may expect from your shopping cart.
Regardless of what YOU may think your buyer wants, statistics tell us simply that the more clicks it takes to get to the payment process the more people that you lose. 

If you give them too many options on a page you are redirecting their focus away from their original focus of finding the product that they want. So the phrase "Keep It Simple.. Silly" ( I was being nice) is never more true. 

Why do we show a tiny thumbnail in the category page?  So we can cram more images into a single page?  Not Good.  Increase the thumbnail to an easy to view image, then one simple click take them to the larger image with description and ability to buy now or add to cart.

Avoid using features such as "LARGER PICTURE POP UPS"  this is simply eye candy and now you are giving your buyer distracting options, more to think about and finally convince themselves for whatever reason to move on and not buy. Right now even reading this you are also thinking about something else... What's going on in the next room with the kids, What's my spouse yelling about?

Ah that's right I have that "payment due next week" maybe I should hold off on this purchase.

So the more you allow the buyer to play within your site, the more chance they have of changing their minds.... YES I know there are as many other reasons for using those extra features to help them make the "Buying Decision" but stats say you need to give them few choices and lead them to the sale quickly or you WILL LOSE THEM... If you have a 70% exit rate then this could be one of the main reasons...