E-commerce technology start-up Allurent introduced its first product here yesterday, a rich media shopping cart aimed at reducing the number people who abandon purchases during checkout.
Dubbed Allurent BUY, the shopping cart is designed be integrated into any e-commerce site's existing technology, according to Allurent. The shopping cart uses a Flash plug-in that is already downloaded to 98% of computers, the company says.
"Our first application is pretty utilitarian – trying to reduce checkout abandonment – but our goal is to improve the brand experience," said Joe Chung, co-founder and CEO of Allurent, Cambridge, MA.
For example, the Allurent BUY shopping cart involves no page loads as is the case with HTML shopping carts, so Internet error messages are less likely during the purchase.
Also, when a customer fills out a field incorrectly on Allurent BUY shopping cart – not enough digits in the zip code, for example – a big red text box appears explaining the error next to the incorrectly filled-out field.
HTML shopping carts require the customer to hit a "next" button, and if a field is incorrectly filled out, a small warning appears at the top after the page reloads.
The Allurent cart also lets customers assign their orders multiple ship-to addresses by hitting button and then clicking and dragging pictures of their purchases into different boxes on the screen.
"Checkout abandonment is a subset of shopping cart abandonment," said Chung. Simple innovations like more obvious error messages and easy ship-to functions will limit what Chung calls "frustration abandonment" by improving the user experience, he said. "There were a lot of search engines before Google. Google just nailed the user experience."
The cart also has a "we also suggest" feature that allows the merchant to up- and cross-sell throughout the checkout process.
So far, Allurent has one "household name" customer, which Chung would not name.
