Adding to Basket - What next??

[OhSoCherished]

Hi There,

You know when you are on a online shop. You add a product to basket and one of two things happen.

A. you get directed straight to the basket or
B. you stay on the product page to continue shopping

I don't suppose anyone has any experience on which works best for them.
Which they prefer when they are shopping themselves.

I'd really appreciate your feedback.

Cheers

Sarah

 

[J-Wholesale]

I'd say it depends on what you're selling and who your customers are. If most of your customers buy a single item, then directing them to the basket page makes sense, as they probably want to check out straight away.

However, if your customers buy a few items, then automatically transferring them from a catalogue page to the basket can be very annoying. Our customers regularly buy 50-100 individual lines - often clicking the Add to Basket button many times on a single catalogue page. Can you imagine how distracting it would be to have to hit the back button 100 times?

If you do direct them to the basket page, make absolutely sure that your 'Continue Shopping' button takes them back to the precise page and location they were at before.

 

[Martin P]

I *hate* it when it takes me to the basket without me telling it to

 

[Christiane]

B. here too, for the same reasons as J-Wholesale.

Personally I also hate it when it goes to the basket automatically.

 

[sysops]

We've experimented with both, and settled on taking the user to the basket page. The reason is this. While some may find it annoying, if you don't take the user to the basket page, many (many!) people don't realise that by clicking the BUY button they've added the item to their basket. So they click. And click. And click some more. They do this regardless of the notification which pops up saying "you've added a thing to your basket".

Users are not bright, on average. You have to cater for that. Showing them the basket page is the best method we've found.

Play.com recently moved away from this, favouring a notification instead. I've been watching the size of this notification grow and grow over the past few months

 

[J-Wholesale]

many (many!) people don't realise that by clicking the BUY button they've added the item to their basket.

That's very true. We had the same problem initially, but got around it by using strong colours to highlight a catalogue item that had already been added to a shopping basket. People ignore messages (and they always will), but they do recognise visual flags. If you make it unmistakably clear that an item has already been added to a basket, then it reduces confusion, especially when customers are paging backwards and forwards through your catalogue.

An incremental change to an "Items in Basket" value at the top of a page is just not sufficient. You've got to make it obvious.

 

[Jonesy]

Totally agree with sysops on this one. Notification works well for established sites like Amazon etc, but most people only buy one item from us.

 

[FireFleur]

Take them to basket, unless there is a lot of items to buy, you could also offer both options.

I am not a fan of the amazon system, it is pretty ugly, and it is not intuitive, but they have product range, and pricing so that trumps, but it doesn't mean they have got it all correct. Their model tries to encourage mistake, and the rational will be returns cost less than the mistake brings in.

Another way is basket but show items to buy below, I think that one is perhaps the best.

 

[OhSoCherished]

Hi There,
Thanks for your comments. It's a tough one isn't it.
We just currently add to the basket and stay on the product page, with no notification. However, we have had a few people now calling up saying they 'added to basket' and then nothing happened!! (they didn't even think to go to the basket, maybe our basket isn't clear enough :| ). This is what brought me to ask the question.

I think we might try putting some kind of obvious notification up to say 'you have added x to basket'. See how this works for us. It's interesting to know what some of the big sites do.

S

 

[TotallySport]

How you don't mind but I don't think yours is obvious enough, quick carts are normally either in the header, or in the right navigation bar, your is only one line and in the middle, there is no real obvious charge IMO.

 

[OhSoCherished]

TotallySport I agree. I think when you're working on a website day in day out you become unaware of what is visable from a new eye.

With a little tweeking this will hopefully resolve the problem.

We are going to be doing some usability testing soon as well so hopefully all these things will come out of the wood work.

Sarah