Good morning all,

I was wondering what most of you do with the add to cart alert. I wish the site would redirect the customer to their shopping cart and ask to checkout or keep shopping. Unfortunately the only options I have now are a spooky system alert saying an item has been added or nothing.

What do most of you use?

What do you think is better for the customer usability?

What do most of the big boys do?

Thanks for all of your input,
Al

I find the alert to be rather jarring at first. I would MUCH rather have the option to redirect customers to their shopping cart with every item added to the cart. I don't use the top or side cart functions on my site because they really don't fit into my design.

I have the alert turned on for now, but I don't know if I will keep it. I do want some acknowledgement of the customer's adding an item to their cart; I hate when I shop a site and don't know if it's responding to me or not.

Jacki

I don't like having the cart send the customer to checkout when they add one tiny little item to their cart. It's like when you're in a restaurant and they bring the food and the check at the same time. You're telling your customer that they've bought enough and it's time to pay and leave.

It depends a lot on your industry. If the average order is one item then it makes sense to send them to the cart. But if they buy 3 or more different products it's annoying.

My old cart host sent them to the cart page and most of my customers hated it. The add to cart alert is one of the features I really like.

There is an online store that I need to place an order with soon, and I'm dreading it. I have a list of about 30 items that I need to order, and each time I add an item to my cart, it sends me to checkout. Then I need to navigate back to where I was to find the next item on the list (they are all in the save category). If I could just stay on that one category page it would be so much quicker and easier. I haven't been able to complete my order yet because it takes so long and I keep getting interrupted. And then they have carts set to save for only 24 hours.

I read in another post that the "Added To Cart" alert can cause problems for some customers with certain pop-up blockers installed. I don't know that for sure but it is something I am considering before I go live with my store.

Most of the reading about this I have done online says pointing them to the cart is best practice. I like some of the carts like Volusion that shows the cart with a button that says keep shoping (sends them back to where they were) or checkout. The alert like i said freaks people out and nothing just leaves the customer thinking the site does not work. Our items are not little ticket items so most of our orders are 1-4 items.

Just the option of pointing the add to cart action somewhere would be nice for a site like ours.

my 2 cents

i prefer to go to be forwarded to the cart as i add items. helps me keep track of how much i've spent so far, and what i've already got.

i concur that i we should have the option of sending to the cart. i ABHOR the alert pop-up. it also looks unprofessional to me. you don't see successful sites out there with alert pop-ups. well, at least i've never shopped with one.

I also totally dislike the pop up alert. Very unprofessional! I am a big time online shopper and I never shop a site that has annoying pop-ups like that.

I am currently building my store and this is one thing that really bugs me, not being able to provide the customer with a "continue shopping" button.
Redirecting customers to the shopping cart page is the most common practice and every single big site out there uses it. I find it extremely odd to not go to the shopping cart page after adding an item to the cart. I hope will add this feature with the next release: it’s a very basic need of every shopping cart and I can’t even understand why is not already implemented in their software.

You can redirect the customer to the shopping cart in the newest version but as of the last time I checked there is no 'continue shopping' option available for the shopping cart page.