Add-to-cart action for two separate upsell items in the checkout flow

Question

Scenario

I'm working on a site with an upsell offer of two similar products that are presented upon entering the checkout flow. I need to let the user know they can add one or both upsells to their cart.

Current solution

In the current design, the user can:

• Check one or both select buttons, then add to order
• Hit no thanks to by pass the offer

Problem

If they press add to order with nothing selected, then nothing gets added to the cart and the window just closes and they are taken to the review order. I'd like to have feedback so add to order won’t submit anything until an option is selected. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can program the plug in to do that.

I’m trying to think of another way to tell the user they should be selecting one or both of the products before pressing add to cart.

Answer 1

Less clicks, please 😬

The trouble here is that you're asking your customer to change how they think about adding to the cart.

Ask yourself a simple question when creating the control:

Is there anywhere else in the site that customers need to first select the product, then add it to the cart?

Hopefully the answer is a big "No!". If not, you probably have a site-wide conversion problem.

Use the site's common pattern

So just do what I'm guessing you do everywhere else: Give them an "add to cart" option.

Profit through bad experience 😈

When you're pulling this kind of trickery on an e-comm site, it's usually to get the consumer to spend more than they intended. Your goal, for better or worse, is to create a wrinkle in the experience that causes them to regret not already having bought this additional thing(s).

Keep an eye on your stats

To achieve your evil end, you probably want to emphasize the "Add to cart" actions and slightly downplay the "Continue" action. Be careful though, you also don't want to see a spike in cart abandonment.

Answer 2

Is it possible to add both items to the cart, or is it one or the other?

If you can add both items, I would just change both buttons to whatever you use on your main call to action on your product page (e.g. Add to Cart). Provide visual feedback that the item has indeed been added, such as changing the the text to 'Added' or something similar. Finally, I would change the final call to action to 'Proceed to Checkout', indicating where the user will be taken to.

If it's one or the other, I would change the buttons to 'Add to Cart and Continue' or similar. This way, it skips them having to select the product, then hit the button to proceed to the next step.

In both cases, keep the 'No Thanks' option too.

Finally, it's worth considering the impact this could have on your conversion rate. Some users may not take kindly to having such a large, obtrusive element with lots of detailed information interrupting them, and may abandon altogether. This loss could exceed any gain you make from people engaging with the upsell.

For this reason, I would consider running an A/B test to see if there is indeed any impact. If this is not possible for whatever reason, I would launch your site without the popup for a few weeks or months, see if you can establish a baseline for your conversion rate, then switch the popup on for a week or two to see what impact it has.