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In the recent times, web has got matured enough from simple text-only or brochure wares, to advanced web applications like e-commerce websites, database driven applications and rich internet applications (RIAs) which gives you “almost-like-desktop” kind of experience using your browser.

This has also lead to the growth of online sales. E-Retailing has grown up a lot since then and has identified several factors of success when it comes to retailing online.  You can visit sites like Amazon, 1800Flowers, Dell, officedepot.com to see how they are doing good business online.

To build a successful e-Retailing (e-commerce) experience, it needs to consider several factors like products, website’s visual design, technical architecture, and user-interaction, content, offers, brand value in the market, banner advertisements. They all build a seamless experience for the end-users, which converts website surfers to online shoppers (lead conversion).

In such an environment, Information Architecture plays a vital role, without which a seamless user experience is difficult, leading to lost customers who could have been converted. However the visual design is appealing, technically it is robust, but without thoughtfully developed information architecture, an e-commerce site is about to fail. For example, if the shopping cart design is not done with a process that suits the end-users mental model, they will leave the conversion process midway and the e-commerce site will loose a lead.

Shopping cart design is one of the most crucial parts when it comes to conversions. An effective shopping cart can be designed which matches the user’s mental model and try to apply these insights with core information architecture rules like navigation design, nomenclatures, labeling consistency, along with visual design aspects like consistent screens for enhanced user experience. Using usability testing methods or prototyping tests at initial stages, like Eye-Tracking or Heat-maps or rapid prototyping, you can understand where the users are entering from, where they are making exits, what’s confusing them and what kind of responses they expected from the application?

Being a core part of any e-commerce application, a Shopping Cart needs to be designed effectively. In the absence of an effective shopping cart, the whole application might fail to generate revenue by not converting users into shoppers.

Rules for Effective Shopping Cart Design:

1. Build a clear, clutter-free user interface
Easy to use application interface

2. Avoid multiple windows and pop ups:
No add-on scripts that slows down browsers and confuses end-users

3. Display Product Shipping costs upfront
Clarity in the costs shown increases trust

4. Customer Support to be prominent
Humane touch is embedded and enhances the reliability factor by making users felt that there is someone at the other end.

5. Design effective forms for Shipping and Billing processes with clear labels
Redundant forms which forces end-users to input the same information repeatedly and leaving the site soon.

In the continuing post, we will discuss more about some design strategies that help improve the effectiveness and conversion rates for such websites.

References:
Read more about US Retail E-Commerce at: http://www.emarketer.com/Reports/All/Emarketer_2000492.aspx