E-commerce sites work very hard to make the shopping cart a user friendly experience so that conversion rates remain high and customers are happy to return for more. But what, if anything, will replace the shopping cart?

Advanced blog site platforms, blog marketing, RSS publishing and all of the other many changes in advertising have made online merchants very aware that the next new improvement to their site will not likely be the last one.

The excerpts linked below references two new ways that may, or may not, make a difference in how your future customer shops.

“Tailgate has recently released their new Transactional Banners at Gettailgate.com/en/. The banners allow shoppers to browse and buy products directly from third party sites which the banners are displayed. It basically lets any customer buy from you without having to visit the site itself, they simply browse and buy straight from the banner ad itself or any other advertisement in your campaign. The feature is a great way to extend your customer reach and branch out to allow your customers to buy from you in more places on the Web.”

The second featured possibility, courtesy Google, allows shoppers to put a widget - the iGoogle - on their Google homepage that allows them to shop from there.

“The new Gadget allows users to shop for items from stores that offer Google Checkout as a payment option. It features top 10 product lists and displays the items for users to browse and potentially buy. Shop With Google Checkout is updated daily with new lists of items for shoppers to browse and make purchases from.”

The writer indicates that continuity of experience is important for the online shopper. Adapting to any change from the accepted methods presently employed will take time.

“I believe that shopping widgets and transactional banners should be used more as an alternative listing environment rather than be your whole strategy. Merchants interesting in selling through these applications should consider using Google Checkout as a payment method to take advantage of all the places Google puts those stores and all the ways they help to cross-promote Checkout enabled products.”
(Source)

Tags: blog-site-platforms, conversions, google_checkout, igoogle, online_shopper, RSS-publishing, shopping_cart, transactional_banners, widgets

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Blogging Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.