Comments on: Shopping Carts should be Lists?

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:40:40 +0000

In my mind there is no doubt your are attempting to display tabular data, and therefore a table is the most semantically appropriate construct to use.

There is no SEO advantage to either approach. However there is an accessibility advantage to a well constructed table. Great resources include:
- http://www.usability.com.au/resources/tables.cfm
- http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200410/bring_on_the_tables/

The focus should always be on what gives the best value to all your visitors. This quote is something I try to keep in mind – “Search engines are blind, deaf, mobility impaired users with scripting and plugins turned off.” [http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2005/06/search-engine-optimisation-is-new.html]

By: James

James — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:21:51 +0000

I am intrigued by the idea of a “list” of items for shopping purposes. But as Mike Jolley has pointed out, a list that basically looks like…

Product A
Product B
Product C

Cost A
Cost B
Cost C… etc.

… is a bit hard to read. Maybe if you had an inline list, such as…

Product A – Cost A
Product B – Cost B… etc.

… and I am aware this is the definition of tabular data but using an inline list can keep code cleaner and not full of s & s.

By: Allen

Allen — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:07:48 +0000

You know there is a lot of free carts on the net, we have made our own. Must carts that or off the self, sometime are hard to adapt to the payment gateway.

Allen

By: Allen

Allen — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:48:20 +0000

It seems to me that the best you could hope for is to reimplement the much-maligned table using divs and lists, and all you’d really gain from the exercise is avoiding the table tag.

Just my 2 cents

By: Diego Herrera

Diego Herrera — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:00:20 +0000

Hi there,

I also see where you are coming from, not sure how much it would help SEO wise as I’m not sure google goes around filling out shopping carts etc but hey, you never know

diego

http://www.corporatewebsolutions.net

By: Anthony

Anthony — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:51:00 +0000

Interesting point Robin and I hope I haven’t mixed the up

You go to the shop with a shopping list, you find the items and add them to your shopping cart / basket. The shopping list is usually a cognitive instruction in the ecommerce buying process.

Though i feel a shopping list is something ecommerce sites don’t cater to.

Also an interesting find is that;
From working in ecommerce I know that alot of users use the shopping cart as a shopping list, actually adding items just to see what extra tax etc will be added on, not intending to actually purchse the product.

This must be due to poor indication of inclusive taxes etc on the pricing.

By: Robin

Robin — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:28:30 +0000

A valid point, but I think you might be mixing the idea of “Shopping list” with “Shopping cart” A cart is fundamentally different from a list, with a list being just that, a list of products, items etc.

A cart contains much more information, and so each “entry” in a list would need to have several units of information, something that is better expressed as a table of data.

Good article though, thought provoking!

By: Digimode

Digimode — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:27:54 +0000

Guys, great battle fought above!
I derive from it that for the time being I am going Tabular Data way.
Cheers’

By: Aswathy

Aswathy — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:47:41 +0000

This is an interesting discussion to carry on. Well i would keep it as Tabular Data rather than lists, I suppose its the way it has to be.

By: Egypt

Egypt — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:55:14 +0000

in this Case you mentioned i would preffer using table to be sortable.

i hope HTML5 makes our life easier!

Thanks,