Going Outside The Cart To Improve The User Experience

[mandy]

'm always amazed at how cookie cutter a lot of e-commerce sites are. You're got your product listings (with search), you've got your product detail page, your add to cart button, your checkout process, etc. And a lot of times, these are pretty boring and just like every other e-commerce site.

First a caveat, sometimes this similarity is good. In fact, a lot of the time it's good. Massive deviations from this pattern can be a bad thing, because users have been trained on this process by Amazon and the other big e-tailors. The first rule of good UI design is to, in fact, fulfill the expectations of your users. If they click "add to cart", they should probably receive feedback that such action was successful.

Keeping all this in mind, lets take a look at a few examples of going "outside the cart", sucessfully and in ways that made the users's experience better...

full article: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/blogs/...e-the-cart