[Sigia-l] Shopping Basket

[Paola Kathuria]

Anecdotally, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to
implement the shopping basket for my online jewellery shop.

I regularly buy beads and jewellery online and knew what kinds
of things annoy and frustrate me about shopping baskets.

I review the (custom) visit log most days and tweak the UI
accordingly. I now often get sales completed within a minute
of someone arriving at my web site.

Features:

+ basket summary shown top-right - grey if empty / white it not
  - line 1 shows number of items and a sub-total
  - line 2 shows P&P (defaults to UK with tax)
  - links to view cart (detail) or checkout

+ add / remove buttons and qty pull-down box per item; no need
  to switch between mouse and keyboard

+ all items displayed in one page

+ can change delivery location on basket detail page

+ all items indexed using a controlled taxonomy - select list
  on index page and clickable tags on item pages (both used
  regularly by visitors)

+ prev/ next links on item page

+ thumbnails of all items at bottom of item page to stop
  people going back to the index page (but people still do)

Most of my sales are to people I've sold to before and they tend to
buy more than one thing at a time (50% off P&P additional purchases
within an order).

The quick sales come about because I have an e-mail version (via
Feedburner) or the RSS feed I created for catalogue updates (title,
thumbnail and tags). Whenever I sell anything, I invite people to
leave feedback on a blog of all my designs but also to subscribe
to receive catalogue updates by mail.

When I add new items to my shop (and most are one-of-a-kind), the
mail RSS-to-mail message gets sent out by Feedburner overnight.
Subscribers click straight through to the item they like, go to
checkout and pay - often within 40 seconds.

UI to improve:
- link to change currency / location
- shop entrance (ahem)

Functionality people don't use:
- change photo size (3 columns/small, 2 columns/medium, 1 column/large)
- sort items

Paolability Jewellery: http://www.paolability.com/shop/

I hope someone finds this useful. :-)


Paola