The Oatmeal awesomely critiques sucky web shopping carts

I love how Matthew Inman’s rants have such potential for teaching people about web design flaws above and beyond any block of text could similarly illustrate.

Really, you can explain in a 300-400 word post how these poor practices increase shopping cart abandonment, anger the pants off users, and have much easier to implement and navigate alternatives, but most people who make these horrible, horrible mistakes think that these critiques don’t apply to them, their wonderful websites, or their fantastic product that internet shoppers are just tripping over themselves to purchase through a checkout process that is only slightly preferable to major dental work. (If you’ve ever gently tried to explain this to a client, you’re familiar with the snowflake-syndrome most companies exhibit in this regard.)

Although Inman’s piece has some of of his characteristic gross-out metaphors scattered throughout, I would totally campaign to have this be required reading for anyone attempting to sell me products over the internet. Even though I shell out eighty bucks a year for Amazon Prime, an even bigger factor over sunk costs for me is that I can remain logged in and use one click ordering to effortlessly let Amazon take money directly out of my bank account. I can’t get enough of it. I can even do it from my phone.

The image-riffic tutorial is far too large to post here and I don’t want to steal it, but it’s really worth a read, so click through.