Add to Cart or Buy Now?

Published on May 08, 2012 Add to Cart or Buy Now?

When a customer visits a product page, what type of button is more effective at converting visitors into buyers? The answer does depend on the type of product you sell, but buyer psychology does gives some useful insights into which might work best.

People make decisions based on their mental state (their mood and the associations they make), so the stimulus presented to their senses – the colours, the images, the language used on a shopping cart page can influence that state and therefore their purchases.

So which is best? To determine the answer to this for your business, think about the kind of mental state that the words create:

• Buy now is an action word that encourages people to think about the end state of the product they are purchasing – encouraging them to switch mental states from browsing to buying
• Add to cart is also an action word that encourages people to think about the process of shopping. It implies that your cart will hold multiple items so can encourage larger purchases and checkout quantities. The psychology behind the analogy with a shopping cart at the supermarket is that it draws on people’s fear the embarrassment. The embarrassment of breaking social norms by having only one item in their trolley when they go through the checkout, is more than what it would take to buy “just a few more things you need”. They get a basket if they only have a few things to buy but if they have a trolley they feel compelled to use it.

Of course, this does not mean that people will buy multiple items if you have an “add to cart” item and only one if you have a “buy now” or that you will get more sales by having an “add to cart” button versus having an “add to basket” button. That’s because the fear and embarrassment of breaking social norms is significantly reduced online due to anonymity – nobody knows that you did.  But you have more of a chance of associating the fear of not buying many items in the physical shopping cart scenario with your shop if you make the association between a shopping cart/trolley than if you don’t.

If you have only one product or your products are not purchased at the same time, then a buy now button might be more appropriate. But what we’ve found is the add-to-cart button encourages people to think like a shopper intending to buy multiple things, rather than a buyer making a one-off purchase.