Ask HN: Do we still need Shopping carts for online stores? - sc90
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Alupis
What is your proposed alternative?

I run a few ecommerce stores, and I can tell you, there is a lot of "magic"
that happens in the "view cart" page.

Chances to upsell more products/services, inform users they qualify for a
discount (or need to add X more dollars to obtain the discount), pre-check
shipping rates, etc.

All of that is in addition to ensuring the proper quantity and all the right
products are in the cart before hitting the checkout page. The checkout page
you want to be as simple as possible. Users are turned off by clutter on the
checkout page, ie. displaying all the cart products again, too many boxes to
fill in, etc. So you clutter the shopping cart page, and declutter the
checkout page.

On the view cart page, we can see why a users bails on the order more clearly
as well. Did they leave our site after putting in their zip and clicking the
shipping estimator? Did they bail because their coupon code didn't work? On
the checkout page, these things can get muddied by other criteria such as too
much info to fill in (shipping and billing address, CC info, etc).

I'd argue shopping carts are a necessity.

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VLM
Google says an alternative doesn't exist.

The closest thing I can think of is Amazon subscribe and save and my
experiences with online food delivery. I wish electronics sellers like digikey
/ mouser / jameco had a super saver shipping option like "send me one box of
stuff per month and add this to my next box, or whenever you feel like
shipping stuff out." Sooner or later someone's going to get B2B chummy with
UPS or fedex and make a deal for super cheap rates at a super slow speed and
for some situations thats just fine. Conceptually its almost a cart its just
you never complete the order you just let nature take its course and it sends
itself.

Or you might be thinking of time kind of ebay like concept where there is no
concept of "an order" its just "an item" that happened to sell. So buy 10
things make 10 single item orders. Which I imagine would make the shipping
companies very happy.

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MalcolmDiggs
I think it's likely that a few years down the road: purchasing something
online will be more like clicking a "like" or "follow" button, and less akin
to a shopping cart. There are some sites experimenting with this kind of idea
already.

But those changes are likely to gain traction in parallel with e-wallets. Once
users are used to having an ephemeral payment device attached to their online
identities, it will be simple to hook into those payment devices without
needing users to create a separate account on your site, add their payment
info, or add items to a shopping cart.

Little by little, we'll get there.

~~~
Alupis
Unless you're buying single items, it's not very practical to _not_ have a
shopping cart. Sometimes you need to add things to the cart, several things,
then review them before the final checkout. Also, from a merchant standpoint,
I'd rather have a single order with multiple line items instead of multiple
orders of single line items for the same person. Sure, we can try to guess the
user's intention and attempt to concatenate orders together to save both the
customer and ourselves on shipping as well as warehouse labor, but this
becomes a significant burden (of which would get passed to the customer in the
form of increased costs).

Add items to cart --> review cart for proper quantities and everything you
want --> checkout. It's a pretty natural flow as it is.

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iSloth
I don't really see any alternative (yet) that can supply the functionality
that the customers and business actually want, for example I like that I can
add loads of things into a basket and then sort everything out when I'm ready
to buy etc, and businesses probably like the fact they can ship everything in
one big item and save on shipping.

There's a few other methods out there like one click purchases and
subscription based models but these are filling a very specific requirement
and don't really fit most models.

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xtrumanx
Would be nice if you explained what prompted you to ask that question.

~~~
sc90
I think the design was inspired by Skeuomorphism, early online retailers
looked at brick and mortar stores and just copy pasted the whole experience.

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LarryMade2
I find cart useful when ordering, sometimes I have a budget and the cart lets
me throw in everything I want then I pare it down to my budget.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
Until amazon's patent expires, the answer's probably "yes".

~~~
Alupis
Amazon's system works like it does because any single customer-side
transaction can likely be multiple merchant-side transactions (most sales on
amazon are not from amazon directly, but 3rd party sellers).

With that said, even Amazon.com has a shopping cart.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
I meant the one-click thing.

