The Cart Blog

Here’s a great post from Nametag Guy Scott Ginsburg called “35 cultural trends that (should) change the way you do business.” My favorite? Number 18, which I thought really should have been called, “Trust is a must.” Checklist for online vendors:

• SSL certificate not just for checkout, but for account creation and login?
• Contact information (esp. telephone number) all during checkout?
• Physical address at the bottom of the page?
• Following up on emails within 24 hours?

37Signals had an interesting post about phantom buyers (you know the kind; they say, “I’ll buy it if …”).  I think it’s a smart strategy to pre-plan your product roadmap carefully enough that you can respond quickly to these people with your own conditional offer: IF you’ll buy it, I will commit to adding feature X in timeframe Y.   Of course, the difference is that your offer actually binds you to something if they PayPal you the funds, whereas their “offer” doesn’t commit them to anything.  Nevertheless, I have found that this strategy is often successful, and takes me in a direction I wanted to go anyhow, sooner or later.

There’s no substitute for hard data. MarketingSherpa found that actual abandonment rates were two to three times as high as e-commerce marketers thought they were. They offer some heuristics for getting to the bottom of the problem, but they don’t discuss my favorite remedy – order total transparency. Got discounts? Show ‘em. Got a shipping charge? Show it as soon as possible. Extra charges? Don’t keep it a secret until payment time; let them know up front.