When someone clicks on the “Add to Cart” button on a product page on your ecommerce site, where should that visitor be directed to? The shopping cart page (the first page of the checkout)? Back to that product page? Somewhere else?

If you send customers back to the product page, you’re wasting their time IMHO. It’s redundant. Once I’ve added the product to my cart, I don’t need to read about that product again. I’m ready to move on.

So if you don’t take them back to the product page, then where? A great many sites send shoppers to the shopping cart. On the face of it, that makes good sense. If they are finished shopping, it saves them a step. Their order is in front of them to review. However it doesn’t compel them to do more shopping (unless you include upsell/cross sell opportunities on the cart page, which we at Netconcepts typically do when we build ecommerce sites).

Ideally, I’d suggest having a combo page, where their shopping cart contents is displayed along with recommendations on additional products to buy. Prominently feature upsells/cross-sells specific to the products in the cart. But also include unrelated products, like: “What’s hot”, “Clearance items”, “New in stock”, “Employee picks” etc. And if you have some profile data on the shopper, include product recommendations that are based on their profile.

If you look at how Amazon.com does it, they send you to a page where further product upsells/cross-sells and offers like “Save $30 instantly with the Amazon.com Visa Card” take center stage, and a mini-cart is displayed in the right-hand column. That’s the sort of combo page I’m talking about, except I prefer giving more emphasis to the cart contents than Amazon.

Any other ecommerce sites doing a particularly clever job of compelling online shoppers to spend more when they “Add to Cart”? Post a comment!