Why is there a 120 limit for the shopping cart?
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Mr. Harry Li’s Notes” (ID: harry_li1008), author : Harry Lee.
I don’t know how you feel about paying the balance in these two days. After the Tmall Double Eleven shopping carnival has changed from the original Singles Day to the Nunchaku this year, the front line has been stretched and a shopping spree has officially started, November 1. No. You and I are both “payers”.
While chopping hands, a Weibo hot search topics arouse my interest “#购物车 Why is there an upper limit?” I found that the number of readings of this topic on Weibo exceeded 120 million, and the number of discussions exceeded 10,000. Many hand-picked parties said that the shopping cart was completely insufficient, which prevented the majority of the last money from choking their hands.
One of them initiated a poll. Is your shopping cart enough? 53,000 people participated in the vote, of which 25,000 were more than enough, and 21,000 people said that the shopping cart was completely insufficient, indicating that this pain point is still relatively large Some user groups have pain points.
Through the analysis of the user’s purchase path, it can be found that the shopping cart has undertaken very important decisions in the entire shopping success chain. Rational shoppers will add shopping cart comparisons when purchasing goods, except for live streaming and panic buying scenarios. For impulsive consumption, e-commerce shopping carts not only carry scenarios to be settled, but actually become more of a user’s favorite function.
Therefore, from the standpoint of the platform and the merchant, the reminder of the upper limit of the shopping cart is to guide users to settle or clean up to a certain extent, increase the exposure of the shopping cart products, and also hope that users will save the shopping cart and favorites. The scenes are distinguished from each other, retaining the core functions of the shopping cart.
02 Demand size and value measurement
From my own use, I have not encountered a situation where the shopping cart exceeds the upper limit, but based on Taobao Tmall’s large user group of more than 800 million, if only 1% of the shopping cart exceeds the upper limit , Then Absolute value also has a huge 8 million users.
We often consider a problem, that is, when we are working on a feature, we need to evaluate the impact of a feature’s launch. It is possible that our feature is to solve the needs of the A user group, and we also need to evaluate the launch of this feature. It will not affect the use of other users on the platform.
Then in this scenario, for these 1% of users to solve the pain point of the upper limit of the shopping cart, we must first think about how much value it will bring to such users and whether the input-output ratio is appropriate. It is undeniable that increasing the upper limit of the shopping cart will definitely improve the user experience of this part of the user, but we will go deeper and think about it. E-commerce shopping must eventually be paid by easy The purpose of the transaction is to solve the problem whether it can increase the user’s order rate and the number of transactions. This is not necessarily true. When the shopping cart has too much upper limit, it may be more difficult for users to make purchase decisions. It may be longer, and users with too many items in the shopping cart will also say that it is difficult to find the item they want to settle, so the value of demand needs to be carefully measured.
Will this feature affect other users? In most cases, other users are not aware of it, and most users’ shopping carts cannot reach the upper limit, so there is a high probability that other users will not be negatively affected.
But in the big promotion scenario of Double Eleven, the proportion of users whose shopping cart exceeds the upper limit will definitely increase. In order to improve user experience and turnover, is there any other way to solve this pain point?
In addition to guiding users to settle or clean up, they can also guide users to add favorites and then add shopping carts. In addition, they also saw some user suggestions, such as a scene similar to Meituan taking out multiple shopping carts, or similar to flowers For the operation of raising the amount within a limited time, the upper limit of the shopping cart will be increased for a limited time in a big promotion.
03 From the perspective of technology and performance
This reason may be the most probable factor. Everyone may have a question. A company such as Ali has so many awesome technologies. After Double Eleven has been in operation for so many years, it should not be technically caused. Please set an upper limit for the shopping cart to avoid system crash
Let’s take a look at most of the scenarios where the shopping cart will exceed the upper limit:
First, from the user’s personal point of view, when the user makes a purchase Car as a favorite; or yes Users with high purchasing power; and because of TmallWith the addition of supermarkets, some supermarkets have more categories and fewer items, which can easily exceed the upper limit.
Second, from a platform perspective, in some big promotion scenarios, such as Double Eleven and Double 12, many products are pre-sold, and users need to add to the shopping cart in advance to purchase.
From a personal point of view, if it is the usual low peak period and the technology does not encounter such high concurrency, there may be no major performance problems, there will be no shopping cart items that cannot be loaded, or during settlement. A system error has occurred.
However, at the time of the big promotion, the system was already facing tens of millions of levels of concurrency. In order to avoid loading cart product pictures, prices and other information from loading, jams, etc., setting the upper limit is to ensure user experience As a means, when the user cannot add the shopping cart and needs to clean the shopping cart, the impact is relatively small compared with the stall or loading failure when entering the shopping cart.
At the same time, shopping cart settlement involves the invocation of as many as dozens of services such as cross-store full reduction, product inventory, coupons, order amount calculation, etc. Therefore, technically, in order to avoid downtime or affect the user’s failure to settle and other bad experiences, Setting a shopping cart limit is a product compromise.
As for why it is set to 120, one reason may be that through data analysis, the majority of users’ shopping carts will not exceed 120, and another reason is that the technical advice given does not affect Choice in the context of product performance and user experience.
Is it possible that we can understand that as long as the technology can break through or the shopping cart can be set to support more, the product will increase the upper limit of 120 products? This is not necessarily true, we still need to stand by the user Weigh with the perspective of the platform. For example, doing A/Btest to verify whether the upper limit of the shopping cart can be increased, the conversion rate of users’ orders can be increased, and the number of products purchased by users can be increased.
The launch of any demand or function is actually the result of multi-faceted decision-making and measurement. In addition to starting from user pain points and usage scenarios, it also needs to be from multiple perspectives such as product strategy, demand impact, value, and technology. Consider, it is similar to the functions of many WeChat that we complain about, such as voice progress bar, group chat management, chat history management and other functions.
This year’s Double Eleven, judging from the data currently disclosed, it will definitely reach a new high, but how high it will reach depends on the wallets of our vast majority of payees. I’m glad we have participated in another 100 billion s project.