There’s an elephant in the room which no one is talking about. Actually, I’m guessing many people haven’t even seen it, but it’s there. The elephant?
Should a shopping cart provider make a product which is good, or one that is profitable?
I’ve probably lost some of you already, so let me give an example. Earlier this year I setup a new shopping cart for a client, migrating from an older product. The new product had a one page checkout that was very slick indeed, so I thought, sure, let’s go with one page. A one page checkout is a feature, and so it sells more products for the shopping cart provider.
When we went live, sales plummeted. All this work, all these promises of increased sales, and what happened? I had a great big L for “loser” on my forehead! I couldn’t work it out at first. It was live for a week or two and sales were down about 30%. On a hunch, I decided to switch from one page checkout to “regular” multipage checkout. Immediately, sales went up about 50% (and order size went up as well, strangely).
In order to make a good cart, the provider would have had to spend substantial time doing user testing, working with beta testers, modifying the product, etc. They may have spent many thousands of dollars, and possibly delayed launch a few weeks. The question is: how many extra units would they have sold because of that hard work? My guess: zero.
There’s still a belief out there, buy bother shopping cart providers and ecommerce owners, that you just set things up how you want them, pump some traffic in, and the products sell themselves. The even bigger elephant in the room is: that doesn’t explain why most ecommerce sites only convert around 2% of their visitors, but some (and not just Amazon) are doing 10 – 20% conversions. There’s clearly a lot more to selling than just pumping people into a “nice” product.
What’s a shopping cart vendor to do though? Make a good cart or make a profitable one?
