Advantages of effective cart design for eCommerce

If your website is designed to drive sales of items or products, its essential that the design of functional features is effective and straightforward, as well as eye catching. And a big part of the purchasing journey for your potential customers involves adding items to a virtual shopping cart or basket, before moving on to complete the purchase. As such, this process is absolutely essential for driving sales and increasing your profits, and the cart itself can be a big part of this. So what are the advantages of effective cart design for eCommerce? And how can you be sure to use the most effective design features? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are Manchester’s leading web design professionals. We work with companies in a range of industries, across Manchester and the surrounding region, including Wigan and Southport, to deliver high quality web design solutions that really get results. As a result, we have produced this guide to everything you should know about cart design and eCommerce.

What are the advantages of effective cart design for eCommerce?

There are a number of benefits to cart design that is well planned and created with the user experience in mind. These advantages include:

  • Helping users know what to do next- if your users can’t find the icon for the shopping cart or basket, how can they check out? And if this process is hindered or slowed because of poor icon design, the chances are, you will miss out on multiple sales. That’s why one of the first things to consider is the colour, shape and overall design of the cart icon, because an effective icon is key to helping users follow the purchasing process, increasing the number of sales.
  • Meeting user expectations- once users have clicked the icon and the cart itself has loaded, there are a number of things that they expect to be able to see, change an interact with. In a cart that is well designed, these will be clear and easy to use, meeting the user expectations and creating a positive user experience. These include:
    • the selected products with the right quantity
    • an option to delete products or reduce or increase quantity
    • a button to return to shopping
    • a button to begin the checkout process
  • Improving the user experience- we all know that potential customers that have a positive experience using your website are likely to return repeatedly, and are also more likely to recommend your products and leave positive reviews. Designing an effective shopping cart, that preempts user needs and meets these requirements is a great way to improve the user experience, and make sure your potential customers convert to paying customers.

Important considerations for cart design

There are a number of important things to consider when designing a cart for your eCommerce store. These include:

  • icon design (size, shape and colour)
  • icon location (usually top right of the screen or in the navigation bar or page header)
  • internal functions and links to products and pages all in full working order
  • options for users to amend items
  • clear and well designed checkout button leading from the cart itself

For more information or advice, or for high quality, professional web design solutions, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.