Ba685: Electronic Commerce - E-Commerce Shopping Carts

E-commerce Shopping Carts

BA685: Electronic Commerce

Unit V Assignment

Roger McLauchlan

Grantham University

Abstract

Online shopping carts are one of the last things a customer sees prior to making a purchase. Customers spend hours browsing a website, collecting items in the company’s shopping cart, and at last they get to checkout with their cart full of wonderful new items. However, many customers are abandoning their shopping carts without completing their purchase. This is due to frustration in the checkout process and is something that is completely avoidable. Online retailors need to focus on improving customer experience at checkout to improve their chances of closing the deal every time a customer goes to their site.

E-commerce Shopping Carts

Shopping carts have made the internet a much easier place to shop. Customers used to have to fill out online forms with descriptive information for every item they wanted to purchase, which could, and quite often did, result in errors that cost the companies money and customers time. Now customers simply click a button next to the item they want to purchase and it is added to their shopping cart. There are many things the customer can do once the items are in the shopping cart but ultimately the interaction should result in a sale. However, many customers are abandoning their shopping carts causing companies to lose a lot of money. That is why it is so important that companies cater their checkout systems to meet their customers’ needs.

The main goal of an online retailor is to get customers to make purchases. The way retailors do that is by making every aspect of the buying experience as easy and pleasurable as possible. Early in the internet’s existence actual purchases were completed by consumers having to fill out forms on the stores web page. These online forms required the customer to enter the item number, description of the item, price of the item, quantity they wanted, and lastly the total cost of the purchase. This was an extremely time consuming task for customers and led to large amounts of error. Many customers would receive incorrect items because they would enter in a wrong item number, or the item they ordered would arrive in the wrong color or size because they forgot to put it in the description. This caused companies to lose a lot of money. Additionally, customer trust in companies, and ecommerce in general, began to decline. This is where to shopping cart enters the stage.

The online shopping cart provides customers with a place to store all the items they would like to buy without having to enter in all the information about it manually. “All of the details about the item, including its price, product number, and other identifying information, are stored automatically in the cart” (Schneider, 2015). Now customers can travel throughout the site selecting multiple items, place them all in the shopping cart, and complete their transaction without ever having to enter anything more than the quantity of each item they want and their payment information. Additionally, shopping carts provide customers with the ability to compare items they are interested in. For instance, if a customer is interested in purchasing a new car stereo but doesn’t know what brand to buy, they could simply add several different ones to their shopping cart and compare each of them to see which is best suits their needs.

There are some fundamental requirements to having an effective shopping cart though. One of those is communication during the checkout experience. “92% of the largest U.S. e-commerce sites fail to have adequate messaging throughout checkout” (Tym, 2015). Without proper guidance some customers may not fully understand what is required of them next, causing frustration and resulting in a lost sale. Another requirement is ease of navigation. Customers need to have the ability to go from the shopping cart, back to the items they were looking at, back to the shopping cart, and on to another search without requiring a training course in the site navigation. If a customer cannot find their way back to the main site from the shopping cart they will feel like they have been trapped into making a purchase and will most likely leave the site before completing it. The most important aspect of