It's a UK-based t-shirt shop that had a very nice online purchasing system. It's quick and easy to use and the process-flow is easy to follow. What I mean to say is that even if you've not ordered online before, it's obvious what the buttons do and where they are to be found.
For the benefit of you lot, my loyal readership, I'm going to clarify the main elements. If you have a look at this little comparison graphic, you can see this important parts of the chargrilled.com shopping system and see how our online painting shop follows the same principles:
We've got a thumbnail image with a 'more info' button underneath it - so have they.
We've got an 'add to cart' button on our item info page - so have they.
We've got the ability to 'view basket' at any time from any page - so have they.
If you care to have a poke about on their website (and they sell some very cool little products), you will see how amazingly functional their design is.
Click on a shirt or a 'more info' button and see how you get transported to a page from which you can select options, view details and add to cart if you wish. It's better to have all this info on a seperate page for each item for a few reasons. The main reason is that on the initial gallery page you don't want to swamp the visitor with superfluous detail, you want to display as many products as you can at once, because only if the visitor sees a product he or she likes will they go on to buy it - the more products on display then the better the chances are that one will catch their eye.
I hate information overload; imagine if you tried to display the thumbnails, prices, size choices, colour choices, postage information, etc etc, all at once. It just wouldn't work. Futhermore, what if one item had more selectable options than all the rest? It would upset the symmetry that the gallery page creates. Not good! Another advantage that springs to mind is that if you wanted to change the pricing or size options for one particular item, you could just go to that items dedicated product page and change your HTML there with no risk of accidently messing up anything else, plus it would be easier that shifting through a fairly complex gallery grid trying to find that product.
Once you've added a shirt to your cart, chargrilled.co.uk confirms that you have done so. This is good not just because it's polite but because it's positive feedback that tells the user it had worked, they know where they are. It's terrible to have clicked a button and then not know if it's still processing or if it's failed. I want our painting shop to be equally as professional.
After confirmation, their system actually forwards the user on to view their cart. This is a nice touch but to be honest I'm not sure it's the best choice. It does guide the person logically forward with the purchase and therefore start handing the money over, but isn't the idea of business to get as MUCH money as possible out of the customer? It is in my books. I think a better option would be just to take them back to the gallery they were just looking at when they selected the product. This is a case of whatever suits you I suppose. I think all things considered, I'll give our users the option to either go back to gallery or view the cart, in that order, without any automatic forwarding. Perhaps I'm putting too much thought into small details at this stage, who knows, I'm just speaking my mind!
If you care to carry on their shopping cart - wow! It's very, very nice in my opinion. It's cluttered, it shows me what I need to know and nothing else and it is neat and tidy - Just what I'm after! You get a little pic of the items you've selected, the name of the item and it's particulars, the unit price, the quantity (which can be changed), the total price (unit price multiplied by the quantity), and a method for deleted an item from your order. You get a grand total at the bottom which is nice and clear.
You then get the options:
1) Continue Shopping - which takes you back to a product gallery
2) Checkout
3) Google Checkout
Option 1's function should be pretty bloody obvious by now, but options 2 and 3 are more interesting. Why the hell would you have two checkout options? What's the difference? Obviously you only need one, but luckilly I'm experienced enough with online shopping to be able to explain a bit about all this.
The first checkout option is chargrilled.co.uk's own bespoke ecommerce system. This has either been custom-designed by a developer that they have hired, or it's an out-of-the-box all-in-one solution that they have bought and paid for and designed their website around. The benefit for them is that once they have paid the one-off fees of getting this sorted, they will not have to pay anything to process each transaction.
Google Checkout on the other hand is different - Chargrilled will have to pay a fee every single time a user pays through the Google system. Why on earth would they want to implement this? In my opinion - the Google name. Google is massive, everything it touches turns to gold and it is a well-known and trusted brand. In a buyer's eyes Google means security. I also happen to know that in a nutshell, Google charges less for advertising if you use it's checkout service on your website - a major bonus for chargrilled. Good tactic by Google.
These are a few things to think about. Sorry if the post rambled on a bit. In my next post I'm gonna actually have a crack at exploring these two checkout options and looking at which one would be most suitable for our project.
Take it easy.
Phil :)
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