3 Tips to Improve Your Shopping Cart Page
Have you ever wondered what it takes to turn an average or under performing shopping cart page into a selling machine?
The shopping cart page is important because it’s the page that leads people to your checkout page, ultimately. You’ll find that by making a few tweaks to your cart page you can see a boost in sales. BUT…
…you must be clear on they types of people that visit your store. I don’t mean your avatar or target market. I’m talking about the psychological makeup of your prospects.
Luckily, there are a few basic psychological frameworks that every human falls into. So the tips below for improving sales are best understood by considering how they fit for the three primary types of visitors.
Improve Sales on Your Shopping Cart Page with These Tips
Typically you’ll find that people on your shopping cart page fall into one of three buckets.
1. Build for the Researcher
First you have the RESEARCHER. This is the person who wants to gather as much information on a product as they can. For a Researcher, you want to make sure you have lots of great product pictures and a product video (if possible). The Researcher must also want to know all the specs of a product. Size, weight, user reviews… and anything to improve the shopping cart page. The Researcher’s primary goal is to have enough knowledge so they can make a logical decision. They are driven by logic.
So the first tip is:
===> Display beautiful product photos and videos along with relevant product info, specifications and user reviews on your shopping cart page.
Now here’s the bad news about the Researcher. Because they are driven by logic, they see things in black and white. And that means when they’re ready to buy, price will be the top motivator. You may have superior customer service but if they can find it cheaper on Amazon, they’ll buy it there. They have no loyalty.
So why cater to them?
Because by catering to the Researcher you make your products easier to find for other types of buyers who are also searching for your product. People like the Straight Shooter.
2. Plan for the Straight Shooter
The second type of shopper you’ll find is the Straight Shooter. The Straight Shooter is kind of like the Researcher but with one key difference. They value their time. Sure they want to do their research. But once they find what they’re looking for, it’s go time. You could confuse them with impulse buyers but that would be a mistake. The Straight Shooter is both logical and quick to act.
An impulse buyer is someone who doesn’t really know what they want yet they make fast decisions. No you want the Straight Shooter – someone who knows they’re looking for and makes fast decisions as soon as they find it.
To optimize the shopping cart page for the Straight Shooter, take what you’ve done for the Researcher and add this second tip.
===> Design your shopping cart page for mobile first and place add to cart buttons at every turn.
Most of your sales, if they aren’t already, will be happening on a mobile device. If people can’t quickly find the information they’re looking for they’re going to bounce. I have two tools you can use for testing your site on mobile.
The first is by Google and called Test My Site. This site tells you if your site speed is where it needs to be on mobile.
The second tool you can use is called Responsinator. Simply enter your URL and you’ll see your site on every mobile device around.
Once your site looks great on mobile, you want to place “Add to Cart” buttons in more places than you probably think. A good rule of thumb is this. If you hold your phone and can scroll up or down more than four times without seeing an “Add to Cart” button, you need to add more. For more tips on how to optimize your store for mobile, check this article, Optimizing shopping cart page for mobile.
3. Lead the Impulse Buyer with Pattern Interrupts
The Impulse Buyer is driven by feeling and emotion. They are quick to act like the Straight Shooter but value how something makes them feel over whether it makes sense.
When an Impulse Buyer lands on your site you can’t expect them to dive deep into product descriptions and videos. You want to lead them by using strategic calls to action (CTA’s) across your shopping cart page. When an Impulse Buyer lands on your shopping cart page, you need to direct them where to go if they haven’t made a decision inside of five seconds.
How do you do this?
With Pattern Interrupts.
A Pattern Interrupt is something that is designed to grab someone’s attention. We all have a pattern that we expect when we go to an online store. For Impulse Buyers a special “coupon code” they can get right now or “free plus shipping” offer that ends in 1 hour is a great way to increase the number of buyers on your list.
Remember when someone spends any amount of money with you, even if it’s just $1, they are more likely to spend money with you again.
Tools like the ones over at Sumo and Conversion Flow will give you what you’re looking for. And that’s the tip here…
Offer More to Buyers.
Impulsive buyers can potentially buy a lot from your store, so do not limit them by a single transaction.
Add upsell or downsell on your shopping page that is designed for impulsive buyers. This is done after the purchase has been made, you can get to offer them something that they might need or want. It could be something like a product upgrade, or a completely different product or services.
And believe me you might be surprised by the result…
A lot of people are complaining how hard it is to set up the upsell and downsell for WooCommerce. To ease your sweat, the one-click upsell WooCommerce extension can do the job for you easily and completely improve that default checkout page in just one click. Its a smarter choice to get more sales on your eCommerce store.
===> Use Pattern Interrupts to grab a prospects attention and make it easy for them to become a customer.
The only downside to the Impulse Buyer is they tend to experience regret more than the other two types. Your refund rates for an Impulse Buyer will be higher unfortunately.
That’s it. If you focus on making improvements to your shopping cart page for the Researcher, Straight Shooter and Impulse Buyer you will have the right ingredients for a nice boost in your sales.
