Keep 'em shopping

[sgpratley]

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Not a 100% AM question but I wondered if any merchants had tested this or if any affiliates had seen any conversion rate differences across similar sites.....

We're having a look at the basket / checkout process on a site at the moment and wondered if anyone has already tested the following:

The aim is to keep people shopping on the site after adding the first product to basket., show recommended associated products etc etc, but we also don't want to confuse people who are just after a single product.

The options are:
1) Shopper remains in the product page after hitting 'add to basket' and a mini basket is amended in the header. Various alerts, changes to the button etc etc are being looked at so the individual knows this has happened.

2)Shopper goes to the basket page after 'add to basket is clicked. Recommended cross sells and other recently viewed products are shown under the basket contents.

The site is a single-brand women's fashion site with a typical 50+ upper income customer.

Any experiences or other options to explore would be appreciated. Trawling a large number of successful sites in the sector hasn't exposed a common practice one way or the other.

We're discussing an affiliate programme for a few months after the site launch so wringing every last drop out of the conversion rates is obviously a priority.

[tbp]

I`ve done the cross sells option before, and it does work well and usually ends up with extra products in the users basket.

Only downside is it can be a lot of work to setup, especially with a large number of products, as you have to go through them and manually map them all. I have tried doing it dynamically, with customers who bought this also bought ..., but on the site I did it on it seemed pretty random and the combinations of products didn't make much sense, so we went back to manually mapping.

Adding a section for the visitors recently viewed products didn't make any difference, and we took it off as it was using up valuable screen space which could be utilized better. I guess its because if a user goes to a product and doesn't add it to their basket, they aren't likely to change their mind and come back to it later. If they do change their mind and decide to buy, they know where its located anyway so its not an effort for them to go back and add it.

[nim-b]

I'd go for (2) if I were you. That's what we do, and it does give a nice option to cross sell products. I think (1) would confuse people a bit. You could always put a 'continue shopping' button somewhere.

We split our cross sell options into two different sections. Accessories (batteries etc) are shown first- this works really well for us for obvious reasons. For fashion sites you might want to have matching shoes or similar here- these are the easiest things to cross sell.

We then have a 'Firebox recommends' product, which is partly linked to what other people have purchased.

When cross selling make sure the items shown are cheaper than what's in the basket- this helps a lot.

We've tested various options and found this works well. You could try doing an A-B test to see what works for your particular site.

Hope that helps.

Naomi

[sgpratley]

tbp - yep it's a bit bit of work but it's a relatively small range that falls into 'collections' quite well so setting these up is taken care of.

I think the 'late viewed' feature works well on huge sites like Amazon where you can't remember where you found the product or sometimes even the name of it, we'll see how we go with this one.

Thanks Naomi, The price tip is very helpful though, thanks for sharing.
We'd love to do a proper test on this, but budgets dictate that we're going to have to take an educated punt on this one for now. If I get a chance to test my own theory later on I'll make sure I let you know how it goes.