How Does Your Shopping Cart Make Me Feel?

I've been consulting with some small business clients that I met during my programs at the San Francisco and Seattle Gift Shows.

Many of them have Yahoo! Stores - and many of them have a problem - slower sales than they would like - or perhaps would have expected.

We decided to check out the emotional experience of going through the shopping cart - and discovered a potential roadblock:

- the "Shipping" information is very confusing, especially to a newbie buyer. One site offered me "Three Day Select", without any explanation - do you know what that is?

And the worst part is that I'm asked to enter my credit card details before I know exactly what I'm spending - I'm shown the items in my cart, with the very reassuring note: "Shipping and tax may be added to your order . . ."

How many of us would complete this transaction without full knowledge of the whole deal? We all know that sometimes shipping can be very expensive - and what's that about tax - maybe??

Abandon rates for online shopping carts are still very high. I don't know for sure whether this ambiguity about added charges is a problem for Yahoo! Store owners, but I'd certainly flag it - and I'd be asking Yahoo! for more details on traffic going through their carts - there are ways to tell where people leave the process.