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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Shopping cart components

So once you’ve read a lot of information on the product page and you’ve decided that it is a product that you want, you’re then going to put it in your cart. Hopefully, you’re going to navigate around the site and select some other products to add to your cart, and then before you check out, you’re going to go to the cart page and review what you’ve got.

The key elements of the cart page are:

  • Item selection
  • User registration
  • Related products
  • Upselling tools

Item selection

Item selection is pretty self-explanatory. It’s clearly showing what the person has put in their basket and what they’ve selected.

User registration

User registration is giving someone the opportunity to register as a member of your site or continue to check out as a guest. There are benefits for the website owner of having people register.

For example, you get more data from the user such as email address, potentially, real address. You can add in some other information that might be useful to you to help you better understand your customers. But in return for that information and that value you’re getting from them, you often need to provide some value in exchange to the customer. So it might be that you’re promising that as a signed-up member, they’re going to get better service or get some additional features. It might be that they get some additional discounts. But again, it’s trying to understand how much value you’re getting from having people sign up as a user and what the value exchange is for the user. And again, how much you offer to get them, to incentivize them to sign up will depend on how important it is for you that people check out as a registered guest rather than as a guest.

Related products

Amazon are incredibly good at this by saying, “You’ve bought or you’ve put X in your basket, other people that have put X in their basket have also bought Y and Z, so these might be relevant to you.” Likewise you’ll be able to see from your own site analytics what products people typically buy together, so again, it makes sense for you to show those related products to someone who has a product in their cart to try and increase the products they buy.

Taking Royal & Awesome as an example, if someone has a particular pair of our golf pants or golf trousers in their bag, we would typically show them a hat that matches that particular pattern, a polo shirt that complements the color and our belt, as we know that those are products that are often bought in conjunction together so that will provide the user with a better experience because it makes it easier for them to find and gets them a better outfit as a whole. But it also provides us with the benefit of increasing the average basket spend of our customers.

Upselling tools

Fourth point of upselling tools is slightly different than related products because it’s using further incentivization to get people to add more products to their basket. So again, examples of this might be where rather than just saying, “You’re buying those trousers. Some people who have bought those have also bought a hat,” we would say, “You bought those trousers. This has opened up a deal to you that means you can get a hat at 10% off or 25% off, or even a 50% off.”

Likewise, you might do an upselling tool that says, “For the next 30 minutes, these products will be available to you at this discount,” and try and create that level of urgency. So there’s lots of different techniques and tools that can be used for upselling, but the key thing to understand is that this point, where people are reviewing their cart, reviewing their total order, is a very valuable opportunity to try and upsell them additional products before they move through to the checkout.

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Graeme Smeaton

Graeme Smeaton is the founder of Royal & Awesome. Along with a proven track record in defining and delivering marketing strategies that drive significant growth and create real shareholder value, Graeme is highly commercial. He has extensive experience managing PLs and other key financial statements, while being an operational board director of AFG Media Ltd, and has experience negotiating with suppliers, distributors and licensing partners.

By the end of this topic, you should be able to:

  • Identify the channels and formats used to generate e-commerce customer interest including e-commerce websites
  • Analyse user behaviour on an e-commerce platform
  • Critically assess opportunities for creating e-commerce conversions

Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:

DMI Short Course: GDPR

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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

Applied E-Commerce
Graeme Smeaton
Skills Expert

Marketing strategist Graeme Smeaton will introduce the key concepts of effective e-commerce and will teach you how analytics allows for refinement of the model. You will become familiar with the elements of a successful e-commerce website and the process of traffic generation. Graeme will also introduce you to various sales tactics, including channel selling. Finally, you will recognize how the e-commerce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems can help you maximize user experiences.