💬 As you would have seen on my other checklists relating to CRO and AOV, just small optimisations and experiments you test can result in awesome results and growth opportunities - and this is especially evident for brands doing big volume of sales/transactions.
Regardless of whether you're a large-scale brand doing hundreds/thousands of orders per day, or a business that is scaling up with 10's of orders per day, I'm sharing these some key practices and areas that you can experiment as part of your shopping cart/basket UX, which can help improve conv. rates, and even help overall AOV.
💬 Enjoy reading these various CRO opportunities below, which many are fairly quick to test/implement - plus, many can be achieved through testing software apps (where there are lots of budget-friendly options in the market).
One of the better UX experiences I've seen for adding items to carts, whilst having AOV best practices in place, are "mini" cart experiences.
This is a tactic that works quite effectively for both AOV and even CRO. Visitors/customers when they see the threshold, are more likely to be motivated to add more to their carts in order to save on free shipping.
As part of the "mini" cart/slider experience, you can also prompt customers/visitors to add more to their cart through 1-click complementary/recommended product upsells.
A test/experiment worth running if you haven't tested this already are running countdown timer for special offers/limited stock deals. There's a few software providers that do this.
One of the core elements I encourage clients/stores I help with growth marketing, is to ensure to add a section for "frequently bought together" (i.e. cross-selling tactic).
You can add this both on product pages, but also on the mini-cart slider experience.
There are some awesome cart software apps available on the market, which can do many of the above checklist points, and then have the extra layer of doing really cool AI/automation capabilities based on behaviour of customers/visitors.
Having express pay implemented and available as an option for customers does help with CRO - it's a better and seamless experience for those who use those payment providers (which is a decent size) - it's all about giving visitors/customers a faster option to check out. Plus, having these logos and providers as an option and visibly seen helps with trust/credibility (particularly for first-time customers).
Similar to the above with express payment providers, same goes for BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) and working with vendors that are well-known.
This is an important factor not only for trust/credibility, but also for higher-valued carts or expensive items, as it gives people the option to pay the cart value over a few instalments.
In conjunction with both points above, adding in Trust and Security logos/badges also helps bring more legitimacy to the cart/checkout process.
I'm a believer that you should be finding ways to incorporate social proof elements (whether a small or large amount) across many things you do in marketing, whether on the site, via ads, and any marketing campaign/channel (where it makes sense).
The same goes with the shopping cart experience - just a small addition can help as a trigger to give customers greater confidence to check out.
Whilst you may assume that new visitors know your USPs when they see it on homepage/product pages, it's worth adding in as part of the cart UX - the key is just adding it as a small element.
More of a small design consideration here - it's good for visitors to see what they've added to cart clearly.
This is more of a consideration for larger/fast-growing/enterprise-based stores (however there are affordable options to have this capability for currency conversions for store growth level).
Having dynamic pricing based on someone's location helps ensure visitors/customers know right away what they're paying in their currency.Usually, brands need to have this setup to take into account different pricing costs for shipping, taxes, etc.
Many go with the standard global USD price or Euro's, but if you're wanting to satisfy users around the world (or you do geo-specific targeting and campaigns), then currency conversion and having local pricing available can help with the experience for customers.
A good tool to look into is Prisync (which has a Shopify integration) - pricing is pretty good for what it can do, and has 40+ currencies available.
Ensure your product images can be visibly seen - not just the single image, but also other images, whether they're lifestyle, other attributes, or other placements.
When it comes to product cards, it's important to include a few key factors, such as price, image(s), variants, and the item's name.
However, consider adding in other elements, both for a better CX, as well as to prompt visitors/customers to take action and add items to their cart.
That's where the likes of labels with "FOMO" elements can come into play.
I touched on this earlier with the free shipping threshold point - I'd make it clear that shipping costs within the cart cost X amount, but if visitors spend more, then they can avoid shipping costs.
The goal is testing ways of making it clearer to help motivate people to add more to their carts, without deterring visitors.
This might seem like a basic checklist point, but you'd be surprised by online stores that don't make it easy for customers/visitors to contact the team.
Sure, this may be done on purpose in some cases, but if you're selling any sort of high-valued items or conversion rates aren't as high as you'd like (even after doing numerous tests), consider a chatbot/live chat option, and highlight phone number/email for people to get in contact.
As a side benefit to helping customers with queiries, it's a good initiative to get some qualitative (and even quantitative) feedback on common questions/requests that customers and visitors are asking - from there, you can then make improvements and optimisations on the site.
Having favourites/wishlists are good to implement for people to save items - can work as a 'secondary' option for cart abandonment and email reminders.
Also, great benefits for data capture efforts to see products which get 'favourited', and then seeing the conv. rates of those which are 'favourited'/adding to wishlists, but don't lead to conversions - and knowing this info can help with pricing considerations, offers, etc.
A bit of a no brainer point here - you've got to make sure that the shopping cart UX looks amazing on mobile - both in terms of ease of use, as well as loading times (needs to be fast).
Then, look at ways to use up real estate effectively with some of the above elements I've mentioned above (e.g. USP icons).
A small addition to add here as a reminder - make sure the CTA button to check out is really clear.
As an important consideration, which I also talked about in my 'checkout best practices checklist', is to make sure you have guest checkout available as an option for first-time customers/visitors.
As a reminder checklist point here, make sure to explore/research some key vendors that can help achieve numerous - in fact, there's a solution for pretty much all the above tactics I mentioned.
And good news if you're on Shopify, are there are numerous providers on the App store, with many being fairly cost-effective and having many positive reviews.
