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The Psychology of Shopping Carts

August 2nd, 2005 by Mike

Postings on this site have been sparce lately, and I applogize. The last week of work has, well, been a lot of work. I am working on tweaking the interface, and adding features to the shopping cart that I build for Artfinale.com. Things seem to be going well, but the interesting thing is why things are going well. …I’ll explain.

For instance, the total of user-created shopping carts jumped when we did the following changes:
1. Changed the wording on the button, from “Buy Now” to “Add To Cart”.
2. Changed the color of the button to red.

Thats it. We have made more changes to other areas like adding a Live Help chatting system, and I’ve working on some new features for the cart itself, but those changes stated before were what made the difference on getting people to put things in their cart.

Do you find yourself clicking on things that are bright red more often? And what about the wording? Is “Buy Now” really worse than “Add To Cart”?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 at 10:28 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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  • You know, its true. Our domain name is a lot of things, but forgettable isn't one of them.
  • No problem. Sometimes it's hard to tell what a blog author knows based on reading only one entry.

    Nice domain name by the way. I definitely remembered it when wondering if you (or anyone else) had answered my comment.
  • To be fair, I really wasn't trying to conduct any kind of experiment here, so I wasn't hoping to get any valuable data back from some post. And yes, if my employer really wanted to do something about this, testing actual users would obviously make the most sense.

    Thanks for the added information though!
  • If you're really interested in finding out which colors work best for your particular design, try doing usability tests with real users. Asking the readers of your blog will not get you any right answers.

    Because it sounds like you've never heard of usability testing or its value, I'd suggest reading Steven Krug's book "Don't Make Me Think" and all of the Alertbox articles on Jakob Nielsen's www.useit.com.
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