Shopping cart, bag or basket? 🤯

Published in

UX Collective

5 min readMar 31, 2019

Buying items on an e-commerce website is easy, you see something you like, you select a size, color, etc., and then you add it to the Cart. I mean Bag. No, Basket.

Ever had this question while trying to design your e-commerce website? Cause I was struggling with this for weeks.

But why use a ‘Cart’ page anyways?

In the digital world, a page like the shopping cart is crucial. It is “a safe place” in which you can review your items before you buy them — an essential step, especially when you are not sure about exactly what you want to buy. But this could also be called a Bag, or a Basket.

So how to decide which one to use?

There is no golden rule.

In any case, since we are talking about an e-commerce website, all you want to do is to reduce the friction in the flow and reduce the cognitive load of the user. Everything has to look familiar and work as expected. Or to put it in UX terms, the system must meet the user’s mental model.

But why is it that sometimes you see websites or apps using different terms for the same functionality, and which is the right one for each case?

The user‘s mental model.

A simple rule in interaction design is to try to create an experience that matches the way that the users perceive the world, and therefore make it more usable and intuitive.

Users form their mental models based on the physical world and the websites and apps they use in their daily lives. So they expect to see a similar functionality to the one that they are used to from their previous experiences, this can happen by using a metaphor to make it easy for the users to think of a concept they are already familiar with. In our case, shopping in a store. So the scenario would be something like this:

Walking into a store.
Adding the products to a cart.
One last chance to think if we got everything.
Go to the registry and pay.

If you think about the physical world, things make kind of sense. You use a cart for larger objects, for example, electric appliances — a basket for smaller ones like groceries, and a bag for the smallest items, like clothes.

But why don’t we use the same patterns for digital experiences?

Finding a balance between innovation and familiarity.

What’s wrong with the ‘Cart’ anyways? Well, it just doesn’t fit with every kind of store. Some stores don’t use carts in their physical stores, so it might not make sense to use them in the digital one. Plus, it is also a bit ugly as an icon if you want a rather artistic opinion.

For some reason, the ‘Cart’ became the norm, and it seems that it is tough to break out of the norms. It was Amazon and Zappos in the late 90s that familiarized the idea of the shopping cart and users didn’t seem to have trouble understanding what ‘Cart’ means.

The word ‘Cart’ has become the default word when it comes to e-commerce.

In fact, in some cases, websites that use a bag icon in their menu, use the term ‘Add to cart’ in the call to actions just because users are more familiar with the term. But that doesn’t mean that every website should use this. It could confuse the users even more, and you should avoid it.

Many fashion e-commerce websites broke out of that norm. Sites like Macy’s use the ‘Bag’ for years and many other websites followed that example. Nowadays the term ‘Bag’ has become the new norm at least for websites that focus on apparel and fashion. Even a tech company like Apple has shifted to the use of the term ‘Bag’ on their website.

There was a research done back in 2007–2014 on how the largest online retailers use the words in their call to actions and it seems that things are slowly changing. But still, the majority of websites use the ‘Add to cart’ as their preferred call to action.

Source: https://www.addshoppers.com/blog/add-to-cart-buttons-a-7-year-analysis

‘Cart’ is easier to localize 🇪🇺

Another critical part of the whole debate is the localization aspect. Websites that are available all over the world in many different languages find it hard to shift away from the ‘Cart’ term just because the term ‘Bag’ wouldn’t make sense. For example, one of the largest online retailers in Europe, Zalando, uses the term ‘Bag’ but when you switch the website to Dutch, you see the word ‘Winkelwagen’ which translates to ‘Shopping Cart.’

The same thing happens with many other languages like Portuguese or Spanish, which the word bag wouldn’t make sense. And of course, there are also the cultural differences that come into play. Just because someone in the US is used to the term ‘Basket’, the same thing wouldn’t work in the Japanese for example.

Conclusion

Use these terms carefully. The users are certainly getting used to the different terms and seem to be able to understand how things function no matter which of these three words you use. But further research is required to see the real impact.

Maybe the debate is more about whether we need to be using metaphors at all for this case. People become more tech-savvy day by day, and maybe one day we won’t even need to use metaphors to explain how some things work online.

Remember to always put the user first.

People can get stressed while shopping online, be thoughtful and try to eliminate any fears and anxiety in the process. Do a lot of research in your industry to see what works best for each case. Go ahead and perform some user-testing to see how people use your website and if they face any problems, there are platforms where you can do this pretty easily.