Benefits of Product Thumbnails in Shopping Cart?

or just the latest e-commerce bell and whistle

[jsinger]

We're giving thought to including thumbnails of customer-selected products in our shopping cart. That would require extra work on our part and would add more clutter to the cart.

Main advantage, I guess, would to reduce errors by giving the customer a final chance to graphically review his selected products. However our customers make very, very few product selection errors currently.

Does your cart show thumbnails? Do you consider that feature helpful in making more sales and in reducing selection errors?

[wingslevel]

had them in the cart for about a year-

a picture is worth a thousand words....

[CernyM]

We haven't done extensive testing on them.

However, our styles have a number of color options associated with them.

We display the item in the correct color in our cart thumbnail, to help ensure that customers didn't inadvertently make an incorrect selection.

[jsinger]

CernyM, very impressive.

We won't have the ability to show the thumbnail in the color selected. We'll have to post something like "selected color may differ from image." Otherwise we could stick with b/w line art, I guess.

What cart do you use that has such capability?

[webtress]

Hi from a shoppers view I like seeing what I'm purchasing especially if it's apparel. Does it increase sales I'm going to say yes. I have gone back to grab an item I thought would match something else, and that was due to the images being there. Now the down side is it gives the shopper the opportunity to second guess if they want and item. I've also remove items that may not have removed at checkout if the image wasn't there. But overall it does have a positive effect on the customers shopping experience which can lead to repeat customers and who doesn't want that.

[RailMan]

just make sure the images don't slow down the cart or you could lose more sales ......

[haggul]

If the customer has already seen the thumbnail in a category listing or seasrch result it should be cached already so no need for it to slow it down really. I'd add them without a doubt - makes the cart a lot friendlier to the customer.

[CernyM]

What cart do you use that has such capability?

We use X-cart. But, we added that particular ability ourselves.

[sniffer]

For those that have implemented this, didn't you have any problems with image sizes being too big for the cart?

[pageoneresults]

Does your cart show thumbnails?

Yes!

Do you consider that feature helpful in making more sales and in reducing selection errors?

Yes I do. The Internet is a Visual Medium. The more the merrier. Especially right at checkout. Those thumbnails just add a touch of class and make the page whole. ;)

[CernyM]

For those that have implemented this, didn't you have any problems with image sizes being too big for the cart?

No. As part of it, we implemented some code that re-samples and sharpens the images based off the more detailed product page images.

For x-cart at least, that sort of code is readily available.

[jsinger]

Latest version of Shopsite announced this week can resize original graphics and create up to three sizes of thumbnails. Haven't tested it yet. I presume some sort of automatic graphic optimization is built-in. Nice enhancement to the cart.