You want the best possible shopping cart, right? Which means, of course, that you don't want your customers getting frustrated even before checking out. So, have you seen the latest e-commerce research statistics? Here's a summary:

Standard shopping carts are killing customer satisfaction

On average, 50-75% of shoppers at all e-commerce sites are abandoning their carts even after adding one or more things!*

Why? Apart from the big issues like overall design, navigation, and sector-sensitive communication, there are two well-documented, universal reasons:

1. buying items takes too long
2. checking out takes too long

Some great innovations like one-page checkout and 1-Click ordering have helped with checking out. But what about just adding and deleting or changing quantities? Has anyone made that instantaneous? And is an instanteous add/delete/change important to your bottom line? The evidence is pretty massive, and a time-tested principle keeps proving itself.

Turns out, time really is money.

The overarching goal of great e-commerce (and m-commerce) website design is for shoppers to find what they want quickly and easily. When they find what they want they should be able to buy just as quickly, which means the least amount of clicks and page changes required. Have you noticed how long it takes to use your shopping cart? On different kinds of connections?

1) adding items
2) deleting items
3) updating quantities
4) figuring out where you
are after clicking "back"
or "continue shopping"

Research shows these issues are critical when you learn who's actually buying online, and what they want most.**

1. most people who regularly buy things online are looking not so much for bargains as for convenience
   
   
2. 88% of these shoppers say they'll abandon a cart that seems inconvenient and/or wastes their time
   
   
3. on the internet, time is measured in fractions of seconds
   

How can you reduce cart abandonment -- simply and quickly?
Reduce the time it takes to add-to-cart by 100%!

The i-Cue Design "instant-add" control gives your customers a virtually instantaneous, "no-stop" shopping experience. i-Cue Design's "instant-add" add/delete/change control eliminates 100% of the waiting time normally used by full or partial page changes that are the norm with standard "buy" or "add" buttons (including Ajax!). Customers using the instant-add control view their cart contents only when they want to and can keep navigating around all your pages, buying as they go, without interruption by page changes they didn't ask for.

Standard shopping carts have either an "add-to-cart" button or a checkbox (which requires clicking on an "add-selected-items" button at the bottom of a list). Every click of the "add" button means a full or partial page change, which means some amount of waiting time and possible loss of context for your customer. And what if your customer is on a slow connection, a cell-phone, or trying to buy something during a high-traffic time or under time pressure, say, during lunch hour? Any of these can mean serious time loss, and thus probably the loss of a sale.

i-Cue Design's 100% solution.

It looks really familiar... but, it's actually a hybrid control that we call

The i-Cue "instant-add" check-button

The i-Cue "instant-add" check-button works equally fast on any kind of internet connection, whether dialup, cell phone or cable modem.

i-Cue Design: It's all about your customer's satisfaction

The "instant-add" check-button is a small addition to your shopping cart that can yield significant returns, quickly: reducing cart abandonment, increasing sales, and increasing customer loyalty. Contact us to learn about the various ways we can help you integrate i-Cue Design into your existing cart(s), template(s), or development plans.

The i-Cue 'instant-add" check-button makes shopping sooo much easier for online customers!

Click here to visit a live site and get the i-Cue Design experience.

Click here to see examples of how "instant-add" check-button styles can vary.

Click here to add a little i-Cue to your cart.

And please Click here if you have any questions.

*Source: Pew Internet Research - Dec., 2007
**Sources: Pew Internet, 2008 ...read more>>