Shopping Carts Gallery

Imagine that you are designing an online-store. Since stakeholders are only interested in the number of sells, the success of your work directly depends on how well you manage to drive users to the “Checkout”-button. In this case you might want to consider some design approaches which will set you apart from your competitors. After all, the probability that they’ve done it wrongly is extremely high.

One of the simplest examples of flawed design decisions is the incorrect use of the shopping cart icon — a traditional icon which stands for the virtual holding place for any products of the store. Used properly, this little yet powerful element can help users to buy a product as quickly and painless as possible. As such, it is essential for the purchasing procedure and therefore deserves to be considered carefully during the design process.

In this post we present attractive, creative and user-friendly shopping carts, bags, trolleys, buckets and baskets — any kind of carts as they are used in the online-stores. Besides, we also cover related creative ideas, design approaches and usability guidelines.

But simple text link is enough, right?

Yes, sometimes. However, in many cases it depends on what kind of products the company or store is going to offer. If the company is going to sell screwdrivers, colorful shopping bags are probably not the best option for the shopping cart icon. In such cases a clearly visible text link might be sufficient. However, if you’d like to attract customers’ attention in a shoes store, you might be better off with some slightly more attractive design elements.

Landsens uses a simple text link for the shopping cart functionality. It’s one possible solution, but probably not the most effective one…

…however, sometimes a text link can be enough.

In both cases the question of how subtle shopping cart functionality is presented is the question of the store design. Shopping cart and checkout-icons have the most significant function for both customers and store owners which is why it requires a thorough design decision. And if there are effective replacements for boring text links then why not use them?

1. Attractive shopping carts

Quite often designers tend to design shopping carts in an attractive way, preferring visually appealing elements to standard trolley icons. It’s interesting that most stores which specialize in products for woman shopping carts look much prettier compared to computer electronics stores. The purpose is quite clear: shopping carts are supposed to motivate users into buying the products.

In most cases designers limit the shopping cart to its primary function — to stand for the virtual holding place for any products a customer selects from the online store. However, in some cases shopping carts are more informal, look similarly to real shopping carts and try to communicate emotions.