Empty cart merchandising

🛒  If a visitor is returning, they may believe they’ve left things in the cart — if that’s not the case, populating with recently viewed items is a fine idea

☝️ Steering shoppers to suggested categories can be a better strategy than recommending individual products - think of this like a mini nav menu, scoped to top categories to remove the “paradox of choice”

Main categories

Main categories

Featured categories and juicy primary “Shop all” CTA

Shop Men / Women

Shop Mens, Womens, Socks and M/W Sale

Shop Men’s and Women’s Best Sellers and Pre-Owned

Shop main categories

Shop featured collections

🛒 You can’t go wrong with best sellers as product recommendations, here are a few designs for your inspo:

☝️ You’re likely doing this anyway if you use cart cross-sells, but consider tailoring your copy in the empty cart to fit the use case:

Your cart is empty. Let’s fix that:

We recommend:

New products!

Limited edition items:

Best sellers combined with copy “here are a few flavors you can never go wrong with:”

Have you seen these?

Recommended for you:

💡 Consider multiple ways to recommend products, such as Best Sellers and Under $X or Sale

Of course you can mix-and-match your shopping CTAs to blend departments with product suggestions:

❓ If the cart is empty, they need help filling it - the perfect touchpoint for a quiz!

To the Moon embeds a full quiz flow right into the cart drawer:

This merchant styles the Quiz CTA slightly different from category CTAs

Another exampl

🍀 Remember Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” — you’ve got nothing to lose here

Theres many ways to do this - check out these examples:

Icons + text:

Delivery options and costs:

Guarantee:

Risk free shopping:

What you can get on this site:

Value prop block:

Show off green initiatives:

Icon + text blended with Shopping links:

👀 Draw attention to your value props with a scrolling banner element:

✈️ Merchants forget to surface this info on product detail pages where customers feel the anxiety. Anyone who accidentally taps an empty cart icon may also appreciate this info before closing the drawer:

🤑 Some merchants include logos of payment methods, this may be persuasive!

⭐ This is a twist on the company value prop, adding a pinch of social proof:

🛟 Aeyla includes a help center CTA….just in case

😉 Maybe a session expired, maybe they’re device-hopping, or maybe you just wanna promote your loyalty program

🐣 Acne Studios shows a fun Easter egg when items are removed or moved to wishlist, or when cart is empty in general. The panel features Sign In and Register links to access previously saved contents (and an Undo link just in case)

😜 If it fits your brand personality, get cheeky with your empty cart copy. These are some fun ones I found in my travels: