Cart Concealment
Hello all. Earlier this year, I had to replace my beloved espresso machine. As much as I hated to see it go, I was anticipating my next purchase and doing a little homework on the web. Shocked? My online quest lead me to a La Pavoni lever machine. There aren't a lot of places out there on the web to buy them. I narrowed my search down to two. Before saying goodbye to my money, I wanted to call each of them.
My first call put me in touch with a very young gentleman who was obviously reading from a computer screen. He was nice but couldn't answer any of my questions. I politely hung up and called the second, www.betterespresso.com. She answered immediately and answered all of my questions as if she actually had a passion for what she was selling. She backed that up with stellar customer service. Then the emails started.
I found out she was a newbie too. We've been emailing since then. We exchange newbie web site info, coffee stories, stories about the dogs and goofy family members. Nice lady. She is ahead of me in the fact that she actually has a conversion rate that can be expressed without a 4 place decimal.
How does this relate to my web site? Well, a few weeks ago, I was telling her about the tweekings I've been doing on my site and asking her questions about web stuff. Hidden in her reply email was a jewel. She said to keep an eye on the competition and what they do regarding cart functionality. Very profound advice hidden in a casual email.
So, a few days ago, I'm playing around on my web site and notice something is missing. OMG! I don't have a link anywhere to "view cart" or "checkout". I shop the web all the time. How could I miss that???? Is it the old "can't see the forest for the trees" thing? Of course, if you added an item, it would take you to the cart. But if you "continue shopping", it takes you back where you came from... no checkout or view cart button...??? The only way to see this was to put another item in the cart... how twisted is that?
I'm embarassed and I blame myself. PDG Commerce provided me the buttons but I just hadn't implemented them... anywhere! Yesterday I spent a few hours reworking my "top_nav" template to include these items and do a little HTML housekeeping. PDG provides tags for me to use but I wasn't quite sure how to use them. I know now, at least for these options.
So, rather than worry about cart abandonment, I guess I needed to worry about cart concealment. I'm still not done fixing this one. The pages I created in Frontpage don't use the handy templates and tags so I've got to change each page individually. And now that I've dabbled in HTML and am beginning to prefer working in "code", this becomes more of a frustration.
One thing at a time. I'll correct my little cart concealment issue and keep dreaming of a real live conversion rate as I work through the embarassment. I needed another project.
Till next time,
Sandy
