A Better Shopping Cart

One of the first shopping carts was introduced on June 4, 1937, the invention of Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma. One night, in 1936, Goldman sat in his office wondering how customers might move more groceries.[3] He found a wooden folding chair and put a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs. 

The invention did not catch on immediately. Men found them effeminate; women found them suggestive of a baby carriage. After hiring several male and female models to push his new invention around his store and demonstrate their utility, as well as hiring greeters to explain their use, shopping carts became extremely popular, and Goldman became a multimillionaire. (Wikipedia)

The rest is history. 

So how do you handle your modern shopping cart on Shopify? If you’re directing customers to a separate page, you could be missing out on some value. The old days of redirecting a user to an actual cart page is in the past. Moreover, the power of the cart has improved significantly. 

Here are some Shopify cart best practices:

Slide or Modal Cart:

With mobile traffic dominating the internet and reducing clicks and page loads, slide or modal carts are the best way to go. Put simply, these carts take up a percentage of the existing page to showcase what’s in your cart. But showcasing the cart doesn’t just benefit the mobile user.

Best example: Amazon.com. When you add anything to your cart with Amazon, you simply see a slide out. Why? 

There’s an inverse correlation between clicks/page loads and conversion rates. The more pages or clicks a user needs to make, the lower your conversion rates. Adding a slide or modal cart will keep users on your product pages, not only increasing conversion rates, but also increasing average order value AOV. 

Free Shipping Bar

I’m sure your site offers free shipping after a certain point. Let you customers know how far away they are from reaching that threshold. A progress bar is a great visual to highlight this. By adding a progress bar, you can increase AOV by enticing users to add more to their cart in order to reach that threshold. In my experience, including a progress bar or simply stating how far away a customer is from free shipping, has increased AOV 23% in a three month period. 

Tip - You can potentially supercharge the above ideas by showcasing the total cost (including shipping) to the customer in your cart. This helps the user know, for example, that they would be spending $85 on their $50 order, so increasing their order value to $100, to receive the free shipping, would provide a much better offer. 

Up Sell

The single best way to increase AOV is upselling in the cart. There are countless ways to integrate upselling your cart (list of applications below) but here are a few recommendations:

Upsell New Products- if you have a new product that lacks consumer awareness, try upselling it directly in the cart. This can be a discounted product (automatically applied) or a full priced product. This is a great way to ensure all your Shopify customers will see, and hopefully try, your newest product.

Complementary Products- do you sell products that complement each other? If so, this is a great opportunity to upsell customers. Say you are selling a pre-workout to your customers; most will likely be interested in an intra or post workout product too. Most applications allow for if-then formulas. Ex. If product x show then show product y.

Samples- The best way to increase customer LTV is by increasing the number of products they purchase from you. If you have sample products or variety packs, now is your chance to get them to try. Make the cost of these sample or variety packs so low that it becomes a no-brainer option. Added benefit? These items are being put into an order for which a customer is already paying for shipping. You’re only paying for the COGS for them to try a different product. 

TIP - Make sure these new, complementary or sample products don’t have free shipping. This will reduce the likelihood of customers ordering just these items, causing you to lose money on said items.  

We’ve come a long way from Humpty Dumpty’s in Oklahoma, but just like Sylvan Goldman believed, shopping carts matter!

Now go and grow.

J 

 

Recommended Apps:

 

The all in one solution. Slide Cart provides you with everything you need to get started. This application will provide you with a slide cart, free shipping progress bar, and the ability to upsell in the cart.

 

Already have a slide or modal cart? In Cart Upsell is your solution. An app that provides upsell and cross sell options that can be tailored to your Shopify store.