RealCart U Course: RealCart 101

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RealCart 101 - Conclusion

RealCart was invented to solve the age-old problem of “shopper confusion” thereby increasing the amount of orders you will receive. Many places on the Web have discovered that a difficult-to-find shopping cart results in abandoned orders. Following is an excerpt from an article in Business 2.0, written by Stacy Perman, December 2000 Issue. She quotes Shelley Taylor, director of Shelley Taylor & Associates:

“Shopping is not a new experience,” she says. “A shopping cart in a land-based store goes with you. It's ubiquitous. You can see the contents of the cart and how much you will be spending. In an online environment, this is rarely available.”

Ms. Taylor is right. A visible cart is NOT the norm; thereby giving anyone running RealCart a distinct advantage over his/her competitors. So much so that one RealCart user, who wishes to remain anonymous, for this very reason has said on more than one occasion:

“Since I switched from (omitted) shopping cart to RealCart 2.0, I have gotten 3 times the orders that I used to get. Our old shopping site was pretty hard to navigate and the lack of orders was somewhat depressing. RealCart 2.0 has changed all of that for me. I swear by it! I don’t dare write you a testimonial though, because I do not want my competition to know how much more we are selling. He may install RealCart too and then I could possibly lose business to his site. I prefer his site to remain difficult to buy from so that I will continue to get a good share of his orders.”

Although this RealCart user has requested to remain anonymous, he DID SAY that other RealCart users can contact him by telephone if they would like to have the whole story. He just doesn’t want his name or web site name mentioned on the RealCart.com web site. We have chosen to respect this request. If you would like his telephone number, just let us know.

There are several stories in several different publications that all say similar things. A good number of these stories do not pinpoint how to solve the problem like the article Stacy Perman wrote, but they all agree that shopping could and should be easier on-line. Here is a list of 3rd party stories regarding the difficulty of most e-commerce systems: (A new window will open for each link below. Close the new window to return here)

1. Business 2.0: The Power of Persuasion
"A new Stanford University study finds that persuasion, customer service, and a simplified checkout process will keep online shoppers from abandoning their shopping carts." (7/25/00)

2. BusinessWeek: How To Get Websites Shop-Shape
"Give users predictability, and make going online as much fun as going to the mall, says a retail guru." (11/22/99)

3. CIO: Uncarted Territory
"If your site is strewn with abandoned shopping carts, equipping your call center to handle e-mail and online chat can help. Of course, that's easier said than done." Offering tips and tactics of three veterans in Web/call center integration. (7/7/00)

4. ClickZ: A Website Is Not a Vending Machine
"Real-time interaction fills the online customer service void, influencing customers to fill, rather than abandon, shopping carts." (6/20/00)

5. E-Commerce Times: Study: Most E-shoppers Abandon Carts
"'Imagine if your local store had aisle after aisle of shopping carts filled with unclaimed goods. It's a disturbing problem, but represents the reality facing many online merchants today...'" (10/24/00)

6. eCompany Now: E-tailing Survival Guide: OK, Forget the Whole Damn Thing
"Online shoppers routinely abandon their shopping carts in frustration over website glitches. Here's what smart e-tailers are doing about it." (12/00)

7. New Architect: Roll Out Your Cart
Article highlighting the experiences of two consultants in creating a customized shopping cart solution. "Along the way, we learned a lot of lessons about sessions, secure servers, and credit cards." (11/00)

8. Redherring.com: Shop Talk: Shop Till You Stop, Then Drop
"The ugly reality of electronic commerce comes down to this: two-thirds of Web shoppers abandon their shopping carts." (6/13/00)

9. Top Floor Publishing: Directory of Shopping Cart Software
Shopping cart software and services for online ordering.

10. Web Developer's Journal: Shopping Cart Dirty Little Secret
"There's a dirty little secret about shopping carts no one likes to talk about: most shopping carts are abandoned before they ever get to the checkout counter." (1/10/99)

11. WilsonWeb: How Does Store-Building (Shopping Cart) Software Work?
"The short history of sales over the Web reveals three generations of commerce-enabling software..." (4/5/99)

12. ZDNet: Stop Shopping Cart Abandonment
Here you can find the "Top 5 reasons customers abandon shopping carts (and what you can do about it)." (2/13/01)

This concludes RealCart 101. Our next course, RealCart Templates 101 goes into quite a bit more detail about how you can customize your store to look nearly identical (in many cases identical) to your existing web site.

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