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Shopping Cart, Shopping Bag or Basket? How should you name this button/text? The following is an analysis of major etailers and should be used as a guideline only.

The collection (at the bottom of this post) of 109 shopping cart buttons from top etailers revealed the following common elements (green items are to be recommended when designing this section of your pages):

1. The icon you should use is a CART or BAG:

a. 64 out of 109 etailers display the cart symbol - 59%
b. 23 display no symbol at all - 21%
c. 21 display the bag symbol - 19%
d. 1 displayed an arrow icon -1%

2. There are more than 20 different names given to this section( basket, cart, items, my bag, my brown bag, my cart, my shopping bag, mycart, saks bag, shopping bag ,shopping basket, shopping cart, total, view bag, view basket, view cart, view my bag, view shopping bag, your bag, your cart, your shopping cart, your shopping carts) but:

a. 70 out of 109 used the word CART when naming the section- 64%
b. 27 used BAG to describe it
c. 6 of the etailers used BASKET
d. 6 used a different designation or none at all

Notice: the names used to describe the shopping cart seems to be correlated with the the brick and mortar stores. For example, apparel and fashion websites are morelikely to use the word BAG instead of CART. This follows the real life, where you’ll carry a BAG and not a CART inside an AE store.Further research is needed (see you competitors and your store rules and decide which one is the best for you) when you decide on how to name this section on your site.

3. The appearance of this section seems to be pretty much the same for all etailers:

a. 84 out of 109 etailer are displaying the shopping cart/bag icon along with short descriptive text of the section
b. 23 display just a descriptive text without any other graphic symbols
c. 1 (art.com) used just an icon without text
d. 1 (proflowers.com) doesn’t have a shopping cart section at all

The icons:

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