spikey - 9:58 pm on Sep 21, 2006 (gmt 0)

I removed "you may also be interested in these products" from the bottom of my shopping cart. I a/b tested it and conversion was higher without them.

I removed all navigation links from the first page of my shopping cart except "continue shopping" and "checkout" (and the item names in the cart contents list link back to the product details - but this is only apparent if you mouse over them).

I moved the date to the bottom of the page. I still keep it so I can search google for a date and see what pages they've got in their index from that date. Helps me see what's been updated recently.

"Join our mailing list". If they want it they can get on it in the shopping cart. I'm going to assume that if they don't want to buy from my site they don't want my spam either :)

"Gift Ideas" (our products are more the kind of thing you buy for yourself). I always laugh when I see gift ideas on a site of products that are the last thing you'd ever buy for someone (e.g. "deodorant gift ideas").

"Gift Cards" same as above. Seems like everyone just had to have gift cards last year - I even saw banks offering gift cards. Some things just aren't ever going to be gifts no matter how hard we push.

The other thing I'm trying to do is take the non-essentail items (anything that isn't directly related to the sale) and put them one click away. Seems to me that's the whole point of hyper-text. If the anchor text is right and the person wants it then they'll click. Then I try to give them a digestable amount of information and then another "click for more information" where they can get even more. But on the original pages I try to keep it really tight. The product picture, name and "buy now" (not the real text) are what's big and catching.