How not to design a shopping cart

August 30th, 2007  |  Published in Internet, Art and Design  |  6 Comments

Buy.com’s shopping cart is one of the worst I’ve seen. It is cluttered with ads, making it difficult to find the products in the cart or how to proceed. The main content the user wants is on the right sidebar — a place usually reserved for non-essential information:

Compare this with Desiring God’s shopping cart:

When we redesigned the Desiring God website last year, we took the opposite approach. We tried to make it as easy as possible for the user to see what they are ordering and how to proceed to the next step. (Genius, huh?)

I know which one I’d rather use when purchasing something online.

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  1. Tim Challies says:

    August 30th, 2007 at 10:41 am (#)

    Interesting comparison. Of course you’re also comparing a business (and probably a struggling one at that) with a ministry. Upselling and wringing every last penny out of the customer is a little bit more of a concern to Buy.com than to DesiringGod.org. I hope.

  2. Josh Sowin says:

    August 30th, 2007 at 10:52 am (#)

    Tim,

    I think the best way a business can maximize its web revenue in an ethical way is to make their site as easy to use as possible. Otherwise they will lose customers.

    For instance, if we went to a physical store that always had people getting in our faces upselling products, we wouldn’t go back (unless the prices were insanely low). But give a good experience, combined with decent prices and friendly service, and they’ll get us to come back — *and* we’ll probably tell our friends.

  3. Tim Challies says:

    August 30th, 2007 at 11:20 am (#)

    I agree entirely. Usability is often the most difficult aspect to design around, but certainly the most important.

  4. Austin Storm says:

    August 30th, 2007 at 4:51 pm (#)

    I’m obsessed with usability in ecommerce sites, and the dg site is tremendous. The only thing I wish it had was a one-page checkout.

  5. Josh Sowin says:

    August 30th, 2007 at 5:11 pm (#)

    Thanks Austin.

    We went back and forth on that issue. In the end we decided not to do a single page checkout, because often times that can feel overwhelming to a user.

  6. Ryan Swanson says:

    October 14th, 2007 at 12:35 pm (#)

    Josh,

    I even tried using Mozilla’s adblock plus add-on, which blocks parts of webpages that contain “ad” related material, and the buy.com page still had tons of ads. It’s pretty sad. Thanks for making Desire God different.

    Ryan

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