Shopping Without A Cart
Using IE 4.0 for a More Efficient E-Commerce User Interface
By Lauren Hightower
imagine going to your local grocery store with a short shopping list. When you arrive, you go to the produce section for a tin of dried fruits. Rather than finding the nutritional information for the fruits on the tin, you wait for the produce manager to bring you a pamphlet. After reading about them, you decide on the dried fruits and put them in your basket. But before moving on to the next section of the store, you must wait for a grocery store employee to come and recount for you what is in your basket. After moving on to frozen foods, you must endure this same series of steps to buy frozen peas. When you arrive at the cash register, the cashier calls out each item to you and asks if you're sure these are the things you wish to purchase. Sound inefficient? Sounds like e-commerce.
Now that e-commerce has proven itself as a viable way for a company to sell its wares, the competition has heated up. One of the most challenging, and most rewarding, ways to distinguish your online store from your competitors' is to create an intuitive and user-friendly interface that goes beyond the inefficient shopping-cart model you see most frequently on e-commerce sites today.
Using the shopping-cart model, the user must submit a page to the server and wait for the server to render a new page for each item he or she wants to view and for each order that's placed. Ordering more than a couple of items through an online catalog can be a time-consuming and frustrating endeavor. And the potential confusion caused if the user presses the "back" button too many times can wreak havoc on an order database.
