The "Continue Shopping" dilemma
Many e-tail sites have adopted the practice of displaying the shopping cart or bag when someone adds something to it. This is fine, because the consumer needs confirmation in some way that the item has been added and many times they like to see the accumulated contents of the cart or bag and the total of the items they have placed in it. The next step is the tricky part. If the consumer is prepared to check out, that functionality should be readily available. If they want to continue shopping, the e-tailer has to make a decision on how to handle this. The choices are:
- Take them back to the product page they just left when they clicked the “add to cart” button
- Take them to a higher level page in the product category
- Take them back to the home page
We recommend choice #2.
Our research has shown that taking consumers back to the product page that they just purchased merely requires them to navigate their way out of it (and if they hit the back button at this point it takes them to the cart which aggravates them). Taking them to the home page is too high a level. If you drive them to a higher level page in the category they have an opportunity to shop that category more. You need to think this through. For example, if I just placed a Sony Hi-Fi VCR in my shopping cart don’t take me back to the Sony Hi-Fi VCR page (image 1) - take me to the DVD Players and VCR’s page (image 2). I probably don’t need another VCR. If I just placed a men’s shirt in my bag, take me to the men’s shirts main page because I may just want another shirt.
The point is, depending on the type of site and the type of merchandise placed in the bag, “continue shopping” may need to navigate differently.
image 1
image 2
