My favorite entries are from:

• Nicholas Deakins
• Crate & Barrel
• REI
• Nike
• Ooga Zone

Good stuff… what are your favorites? Let me know by posting a comment – I look forward to your feedback!

In the features section, Chris has a good starter list of things that are important for an e-commerce solution to support:

• Coupons
• Inventory Tracking
• Recommended Products
• User Reviews
• Shipping Options
• International Support
• Integration with other Systems
• Search
• Organizational Capabilities
• Customer / User Benefits
• Statistics / Tracking
• Checkout Process

Off the top of my head, I’d look for widget support, an active development community, usability on the merchandising side… just as some starts. Overall, really solid high level article and a good starting place.

The Overview

There are two different ways to look at shopping cart abandon rates (or the reverse, cart conversion rates,) and it is important to make a distinction and always measure apples to apples. At different points in a campaign, one methodology will fit better than the other. Note that I’ve completely made up the names for these methodologies below… but maybe they’ll catch on and I’ll be famous.

Pure cart methodology. In “pure cart,” abandonment is measured as the % of shopping carts initiated that do not result in an order. A cart is typically initiated when a user adds a product to the cart.

Pro’s:

1. Gives an optimistic view of opportunity
2. Allows you to track interaction with the “checkout now” button
3. Can expose more users to testing, driving more revenue

Con’s:

1. Doesn’t necessarily represent actual revenue opportunity
2. Some users are just shoppers, not buyers
3. Can pull focus from true detractors of conversion

True checkout methodology. In “true checkout,” abandonment is measured as the % of users that click through the shopping cart (via a checkout now button, place order link, etc.) and that do not complete an order.

Pro’s:

1. Gives a conservative view of revenue opportunity
   
2. Forces attention on forms and high value elements
   
3. Drives an understanding of users that want become buyers

Con’s:

1. Can cause shopping cart usability issues to be ignored
2. Discounts potential revenue opportunity higher in the funnel
3. Ignores all actions before the checkout click

I mentioned that each methodology is more or less appropriate given the situation, and this takes a little bit of feel. Look at the your objective, and apply both methodologies. Document what you gain and lose from each one, and choose the best option. Or, if you can manage it, measure both pure cart and true checkout abandonment.

Measuring Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

The major analytics providers support this metric to varying degrees; from out of the box to requiring significant configuration changes. The best thing to do is to consult the documentation or your account manager to ensure that you are properly set up to measure abandonment. See “Appendix A” for further notes on specific analytics providers.

Regardless of the analytics platform used, you must take care to ensure you are set up for success. In the analytics world, this means make sure that you are tracking user activity properly and accurately.

Abandonment tracking tips:

1. Ensure each step in checkout is tagged and tracked separately through a unique page or event name.
2. QA your data before beginning a project. If you setup your funnel and see more visitors in Step 2 than Step 1, you have a problem.
3. Ideally you should track every state change, including error handling, and be able to report back on changes on even the most granular of activities.
4. Any time there is a change to any element in your checkout, re-confirm that your tracking is accurate.

After you confirm that you are setup to track users and report back on their activity accurately, create a baseline for shopping cart abandonment. Throw away any historical numbers your business has. Educate your peers and any relevant stakeholders on the current running abandonment rate and make sure that once the metric is tracked correctly, it stays correct.

As a final note on tracking: be smart when comparing cart abandonment rate over time frames. This is a dynamic metric and subject to many outside influences. Seasonality, marketing programs, sales, promotions, and economic conditions can all have drastic effects on the metric. When testing and optimizing your shopping cart to reduce abandonment, ensure that you are running inline A/B tests and comparing apples to apples.

Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

Before we jump into tips, ideas, and concepts for reducing abandonment rate, I want to be very clear; there are no silver bullets. Best practices are a great starting point but you should always hypothesize, test out, prove, and document optimizations to the shopping cart if it is an option. This is especially important in large organizations, where often you have to start small to prove your case. When you feel confident you are ready to get started, brainstorm with the questions below.

• Do we have too many steps?
• Are we being clear about costs like shipping and tax?
• Do users have good reason to feel secure?
• Are we asking only for relevant information?
• Do our forms follow good usability practices?
• Are we communicating to our users with step-guides and helpful tips?
• Do we display supporters to conversion, like guarantees?
• Are we focusing user attention where it needs to be?
• When an error occurs, is it clear where it is and how to fix it?
• Are coupons positively or negatively affecting our business?
• Can we follow up with users to drive more conversions?
• If a user exists to browse, is the path back to the cart clear?

As you dig deeper into your own rates and performance, you will be able to expose the bottlenecks specific to your business. Brainstorming on these bottlenecks will expose more questions and lead to more actionable insights. Just work the process! Analyze, hypothesize, test, confirm, repeat.

Hopefully this guide has given you a good overview of cart abandonment, how to track it, and you have found value in the tips and suggestions presented. If you have any questions or further thoughts on cart abandon rates, please leave a comment and I’ll be happy to update the guide above.

[Header image source.]

Below is a list of 6 e-commerce button resources and a brief overview of each link.

This list from Get Elastic actually has 111 buttons!

107 Add to Cart Buttons

This is definitely a dated post but it is always surprising to see how slowly big e-commerce responds to design evolution. In 107 Add to Cart Buttons of the Top Online Retailers, the folks at Get Elastic catalog many buttons and take a look at how button design affects usability.

Of further note in this article is the concept of the add to cart button enhancing a brand’s persona. This is a great read and it set off a thought for me. When working with big retailers, it is rare to see them make the connection between brand and usability. More often than not these teams will look at a button and match a template, get inspiration from elsewhere, or just fit the brand. These methods can likely get you most of the way there, but the real wins will come with asking things like:

• How can I support my brand with this button?
• What language or voice will my users respond to?

… and applying them to the design process along with typical usability standards.

111 Designs for Checkout Buttons

Pitstop Media searches for the perfect checkout button.

Pitstop Media collected and analyzed 111 Designs for Checkout Buttons, documented overall themes and attributes and explored the trends behind design. In a follow up article, they noted the individual design elements for each button and created a best of breed checkout button based on the design patterns of this list.

I very much enjoy looking at data this way, and often recommend aligning with standards. It’s one of the principles behind this website. That said, it’s always important to remember that sometimes it is better to be the outlier. Just make sure you’re the outlier because you’re doing things better than everyone else.

Collection of 140+ Buttons

Dragnet's inspirational button collection.

Jonas at Dragnet harvested over 140 buttons for inspiration. This is a great place to look for “what fits” because it represents many, many styles of buttons regardless of their source or intent. As I noted earlier, e-commerce is typically slow to respond to new trends (even standards) in design, so if you’re looking for what’s next, it can serve you to look outside of the space you’re in.

A valuable aspect of all the collections thus far is the ability to click through on the buttons and see them in their natural habitats.

300 Images from 1800 Sites

Shopping Carts and Bags Icons

This page has an interesting story behind it – and a browse that surely took some time and effort to accomplish. Scroll to the bottom of 300 Images from 1800 Sites to review the collection of shopping cart and bag icons.

Ro points out that the shopping cart images are not well done in comparison to the shopping bags, and I tend to agree. It definitely seems to be difficult to capture a shopping cart in that space. That said, perhaps it is the subject. I have seen (offline) some beautiful shopping bags, but I cannot remember ever seeing a breathtaking shopping cart. For some reason, when I picture a shopping cart, it’s in front of a Walmart or a grocery store of some sort. Regardless, the collection is definitely worthy of reviewing, the content is great, and the author’s hard work in compiling the images is much appreciated.

Shopping Carts Gallery

This article explores multiple ecommerce attributes.

Smashing Magazine is a much-visited resource for me and they have multiple pieces of good content and inspiration in the ecommerce field. Technically, this article focuses much more than on e-commerce buttons, but in the spirit of this being an inspirational resource I’ve included it.

The examples explored represent the good, the creative, the innovative, and certainly the ugly and the wrong. For bonus inspiration, check out the related article 12 Tips for Designing an Excellent Checkout Process.

Icon Sets for E-Commerce Designs

This compilation focuses on ecommerce icons.

Still following the icon theme, the final resource houses 30 sets of e-commerce icons from various sources online. Some of the examples given are free, some are premium, and some aren’t quite up for grabs anymore but are still great to review. Featured images include: shopping carts, baskets, and bags, payment and finance icons, credit card logos, and coupon icons. The only thing I don’t see is something for shipping.

This is a top notch compilation. As a bonus link, the author also runs a site called CartFrenzy, which serves as a “Showcase of Excellence in E-Commerce Design,” a great inspirational resource to end on.

Hopefully you find this e-commerce buttons resource helpful and worthy of revisiting the next time you need some inspiration for your redesign and optimization projects. Please leave a comment below if you know of a site worth adding to this list!