Add to Basket or Add to Cart?

James Miodonski 12th of October 2012

It’s probably not a topic of huge debate around most dinner tables, but in the cut-throat world of eCommerce every little helps. Even the smallest advantage over your online competition can make the difference between bagging a sale and your user wandering off to buy elsewhere, and personally I’m very much of the opinion that this stuff matters!

I have a bit of a theory in that, people are now so used to the way the main eCommerce ‘online high street’ sites (Amazon, eBay and such like) work these days – that they’re far less tolerant when they have to use a slow, non-intuitive (often clunky) shopping cart system, often found on smaller sites.

So – here’s what the big boys of online retail are up to this year:

Call To Action – Button Colour

We’re constantly banging the drum about making calls to action clear, obvious and easy to find. It appears the big boys agree –

58% of the UK’s top eCommerce websites use either Green or Orange for their main, key ‘Do This‘ button. Here’s the rest:

Full Breakdown

Call To Action – Phrase / Message

Here in the UK we’re generally more accustomed to Shopping Baskets rather than the very Americanised ‘Carts’, and this is reflected in the message used by most of the main players.

As expected, ‘Add to Basket‘ is found on 25% of the sites checked, compared to just 4% opting for ‘Add to Cart‘ – and here’s the rest:

Full Breakdown

The recent surge in popularity of online rental sites, namely Netflix and LoveFilm account for the Free Trial / Free Month offers.

Both Kit and Chris took great delight in mocking me for actually being sad enough to notice these sort of things, but stuff them – here it is anyway and I hope it’s of both interest and use to your efforts!