Introducing Floating Cart Manager

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Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

If you haven’t already come across the new "Floating Cart Manager" link in Store Manager, have a look under the Edit column the next time you sign in. We’re very happy to share the news that earlier today, we released new floating cart, mini-cart, and Floating Cart Manager features for all Yahoo! Merchant Solutions and Yahoo! Store merchants.

Using Floating Cart Manager, you can now set up and customize a mini-cart and floating cart for your store pages. These features are designed to keep your customers in the shopping flow until they’re ready to complete their order, which helps optimize their shopping experience and encourages increased order values.

If you aren’t sure what a mini-cart and floating cart are, have a look at the screen shot below. The mini-cart (A) is integrated directly within your store pages, and displays a summary of shopping cart information to your customers. The floating cart (B) hovers or "floats" above your store pages, and lets customers view items in their cart and their order subtotal, change item quantities, and calculate shipping costs, without exiting your store pages to a separate checkout flow.

The mini-cart and floating cart.

Mini-cart and floating cart features

Floating Cart Manager allows you to customize and manage your mini-cart and floating cart settings. If you wish, you can enter your own mini-cart label, rather than use the default "Your Shopping Cart" label we’ve provided. Our help page lists common mini-cart labels used across sites in the Internet Retailer Top 500. You can select information to display in the mini-cart (item count, order subtotal, or both), and upload a custom mini-cart icon, such as a shopping cart or shopping bag.

When you enable the floating cart, you can opt to show it only when a customer adds an item to their cart, and can set an amount of time for the cart to remain open following an add-to-cart action. You may choose to show or hide shipping calculator and coupon code sections, and can add your own custom content, such as special store promotions or other important information.

You can also create a free shipping offer to display directly within the floating cart. In Floating Cart Manager, simply select an existing shipping method to use for free shipping, enter a required order value, and choose to display messages before and after an order qualifies. For example, you may wish to let customers know how much more they must add to their order to qualify for free shipping, and then inform them when their order qualifies for the promotion. To learn more about creating a free shipping offer, please see our help page.

Free Shipping Offer section in Floating Cart Manager.

The appearance of your mini-cart and floating cart is easy to customize. Select settings for fonts, links, background, header, footer, border, buttons, and floating cart icons in the Visual Settings tab of Floating Cart Manager. Developers or merchants familiar with CSS may choose to customize their display settings using custom CSS.

How do I enable the mini-cart and floating cart?

The mini-cart and floating cart are enabled using Floating Cart Manager, but require code to be present in your store pages. A floating cart operator and mini-cart ID have already been added to Editor 3.0 templates (storetemplate. template). Merchants using Editor 3.0 templates must publish Store Editor prior to enabling the mini-cart and floating cart for the first time in Floating Cart Manager. Merchants using Editor 2.0 templates or custom templates have manual setup options, which can be found in the Manual Setup tab of Floating Cart Manager, or in our manual setup help section.

Installing and publishing this code will not enable the mini-cart and floating cart on your site. These must be enabled using Floating Cart Manager.

What types of stores can benefit from using a floating cart?

A floating cart is recommended for stores from which customers are likely to purchase more than one item per order. These include stores that sell apparel, craft supplies, sporting goods, food items, cosmetics, books, music, or DVDs, as just a few examples. These types of stores can use a floating cart to prevent customers from having to go through the extra step of clicking a "Keep shopping" button to return to their store pages. Keeping customers within the shopping flow until they’re ready to complete their order can encourage larger orders.

Stores that sell big-ticket items, such as appliances or furniture, do not typically display a floating cart. Since customers of these stores are mainly shopping for and purchasing one item only, a common shopping flow for these stores is to immediately take customers to checkout to complete their order.

All types of stores may wish to include a mini-cart within their store pages, to display a basic summary of selected cart information to customers, without affecting the shopping and checkout flow.

Floating Cart Manager resources and help

Help information and links for mini-cart and floating cart settings can be found within Floating Cart Manager. Check the gray help boxes located to the right of most Floating Cart Manager fields for more information about a setting, and for a link to more information. Help for global settings, visual customization, manual setup, and general questions can also be found in our floating cart help pages.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business
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