Sometimes shopping online is just like shopping in a traditional store.
Why does every comment I see about shopping on the Web seem to assume that Net shopping is supposed to be radically different from shopping in a traditional store?
So many times we read about the high percentages of people who surf to a Web shopping site, put articles in the "shopping cart", and then abandon them.
But isn't that what we normally do when browsing through bricks-and-mortar stores?
Sure the shopping cart might only be a mental one, but if I was expected to buy everything I ever made a mental note about, I'd have a credit card bill the size of Australia's GNP (OK, and a pretty nice home theatre system).
One site that has all the answers in this respect is Amazon.com.
And the feature that sets it apart is the ability to save prospective purchases on a wishlist.
This is one area where Web shopping beats traditional browsing hands down (mainly because those mental shopping lists I make when walking through stores never seem to stay in memory that long).
And if the site can use my wishlist to come up with other recommended purchases that might suit my tastes (as Amazon does), I'm happy about that, too.
I would be willing to bet that a pretty good number of those abandoned shopping carts come not from people becoming fed up with the purchase process, but rather from the fact that they were probably just using the cart to take mental notes of certain interesting products.
Now other sites are coming up with similar features, but Amazon's is truly streets ahead. Not only are there easy, one-click methods of sending the contents of your wishlist to friends and family, but the system is also smart enough to tell anyone buying a specific gift from that wishlist if another person has already bought that product.
So let's not blame everything on the poor old shopping cart (or lack of it). It's better to remember that, more often than not, people shopping on the Web will act in the same way they do in a traditional store.
