The Ultimate Shopping Cart?

I came across this image the other day and it brought back some memories of online shopping carts and real shopping carts.

When I joined MP3.com in early 1999, the site had no shopping cart, even though it did e-commerce and even though it made perfect sense for there to be a shopping cart. Nobody had had time yet to build one! So users who wished to order custom-burned CDs by MP3.com artists could go ahead and order them, but they had to place separate orders for each CD! That meant separate name, address, city, state, zip, credit card info, the works, for each item! Suffice to say, this was not user-friendly (nor the best way to make money).

So we needed to build a shopping cart pronto. Only one gotcha -- there was no customer database. Minor detail, right? Not if you expect millions of users to be visiting and registering your site. You kinda want to build the database right, and build it so it can scale well, and be adaptible to future enhancements. So we had to build that and a complete e-commerce system including credit-card authorization. And the goal was to launch it all in 60 days.

In a fit of madness, I decided to drive over to the nearby Ralph's grocery store, and went in and found the store manager.

"Hi, I'm a manager over at an Internet startup in town, you may have heard of it, MP3.com?"

"Uh, huh." He looked at me like I was some kind of kook. I handed him by business card.

"We're working on a project to build an electronic shopping cart so people can buy CDs online easily and quickly. I would like to know if I could borrow one of your Ralphs shopping carts for a while to take back to work as a daily reminder to everyone what our focus should be right now."

He looked at me funny, smiled, did a one-minute manager decision, and said, "Sure, go ahead. Just take one out of the parking lot."

And that was that. So I went out to the parking lot, and very nonchalantly picked up one of these very heavy steel shopping carts and loaded it into my Izusu and drove back to the office. Got some funny looks from fellow MP3 co-workers when I rolled this squeaky metal thing through the hallways. Why, it even had a bad front wheel that wiggled uselessly as I pushed the thing forward (carefully avoiding the freshly-painted walls as it veered to the left or right --- one thing this cart did not want to do was head straight-ahead).

Once in my office I looked at the cart and realized, hmmm, wouldn't it be interesting if this cart had a flat-panel display on it.... or at least a mockup of one... an hour later, I snapped this picture. The front photo showed the UI for the MP3.com shopping cart web page, and of course, the message on that page said, "You currently have no items in your shopping cart."

Two or three months later, the electronic shopping cart went live, our revenue jumped as people could start buying more than one item at a time (duh), and I brought the cart back to the store. Just dropped it off in the parking lot, leaving the MP3.com "screens" in the cart's advert-frames. I always wondered what the patron thought who subsequently picked that cart... Posted by brian at September 23, 2002 04:42 PM