Published on May 15, 2012 Why you should save customer carts for increased sales
For security reasons, good websites will time out a visitor after a certain period of inactivity and they will need to log in again. If you’re a shopper on the site, have 10 things you have carefully picked and then you get timed out, how will you feel if there’s no easy way to pick up where you left off?
In choosing an ecommerce application for your business, it’s important that you consider this in the design of your website. A cart that times people out if they don’t buy in a certain period of time, clears their cart on them while their shopping, or has a “clear all” button which could get clicked by accident is not going to be a very popular online store front for your business.
In setting the time out length? What’s appropriate? There are no hard and fast rules, but in many online web systems, 15 minutes of inactivity seems to be a general-standard for time-outs. Whatever the time out length is, it’s important that what is in a customer’s shopping cart is saved in the system’s database so that when the customer logs back in to resume their shopping, they can.
What about in websites that don’t encourage customer’s to create accounts, where customers just buy on a one-off basis every time they want to purchase? In those situations, one way of dealing with this is that the cart system still saves the customer’s cart contents and when they enter their information on checkout that it picks up that they previously had items in the cart and returns the contents so they can have the option of purchasing those things. When that’s the case, a message on the time out page could help you with conversions as it will encourage customers to start shopping again.
If you have a how to checkout page on your website, put information on it about how your shopping cart works, so at least customers have that information at their fingertips. You could have a how to checkout page on your About Us page or a link to it in your sidebar. Make sure that it opens in a popup window or a new window so that people don’t lose where they were at.
Unfortunately customers can be fickle and the slightest thing – even if it’s not your fault – can set them off. Make it as easy as you can for customers to take their carts through checkout and it will help you convert more visitors into buyers.
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