What is the most valuable moment of the cellar door sale? Many would say it is when, after the tasting, the customer trusts the product and decides to purchase it immediately, without hesitation. That act of buying is pure, fast, and totally free of friction. For beverage companies focused on Direct to Consumer (D2C), the challenge is to replicate this trust and fluidity in the digital environment within online carts.
The excellence of a wine, a spirit, or a beer cannot clash with a slow or confusing online process. The user experience (UX) must ensure that the transition from emotion (desire) to action (purchase) is immediate. The goal is to trigger the customer’s intuition and naturalize the e-commerce purchase process, thereby simplifying the sale and transforming interest into an instant sale.
Simplifying Online Cart Checkout to Naturalize the Purchase
What would happen if a customer, already won over through the tasting, lost their purchase intent once they arrived at the checkout?
The same thing that happens in a digital store: in the beverage sector, it is essential to be able to offer all customers from all over the world the chance to buy your bottles. Furthermore, the simplicity of navigation must be equally fluid for the Italian customer as it is for the Finnish one: the ideology that ‘if they want to buy, they must also put in the effort’ is no longer successful in the global market, because customers worldwide are accustomed to the same fundamental purchasing simplicity.
Treating opportunities arising from abroad superficially can lead to the almost total abandonment of carts. In fact, according to the average of industry studies on e-commerce, data indicates that about 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before the purchase is completed.
To naturalize the purchase and seize all available opportunities, it is advisable to simplify and divide the operation into a few visible steps and to use solutions such as the Digital Wallet—a tool that stores payment data and drastically speeds up the transaction—and Click to Pay methods. These are online payment methods that allow purchases to be made quickly and securely without having to manually enter card data for every transaction (such as Google Pay and Apple Pay).
Simplifying Navigation
A digital user who lands on an e-commerce site expects clarity and immediacy, starting from the institutional website itself: a clearly visible menu, organized sections, and figurative simplicity. The choice of the cart icon, for example, must be standardized, as excessive personalization would compromise its immediate recognition, and its position must be intuitive.
Also fundamental is the visual hierarchy of the texts: a bold title captures attention, just as highlighting the phrase “free shipping” in bold and in a color that stands out from the corporate palette must have visual prominence over the price.
Furthermore, to prevent the user from giving up, it is necessary to offer the option to purchase without the obligation of registration, as this step is often perceived as a barrier and a waste of time.
Finally, it is essential to ensure navigation is available in at least the English language. For customers from specific areas of the world, it is highly recommended to localize the content: an immediate linguistic understanding significantly improves the experience and engagement. Warning: relying on automatic translation plug-ins can compromise the quality of the translation and may convey superficiality and unreliability.
Transparency Becomes Authority
Customer trust is also based on price certainty. The online store must address the complexity of logistical costs (which vary by weight, alcohol content, and destination), as these could represent a cause of cart abandonment. It is essential to establish total transparency: immediately display the definitive final cost in the summary, inclusive of all expenses (shipping, VAT, excise duties, and customs charges).
This clarity regarding the price demonstrates operational honesty, a fundamental element that, according to the principles of the psychology of persuasion, establishes the vendor’s credibility and reliability.
Providing definitive calculations for international taxes is not just a technical detail, but an act of authority that prevents economic losses and strengthens the relationship of trust with the customer.
The Website's Performance Serving Online Cart Sales
The e-commerce site must operate with maximum efficiency across all types of devices. It is important not to neglect the display on tablets and especially smartphones, from which customers are purchasing more and more frequently.
It is often useful to install plug-ins, usually free, that inform the site owner about navigation metrics and the devices users employ to visit the page. Others also communicate the users’ origin and the number of abandoned carts.
These are essential indicators for improving and adapting the site to the real and concrete needs of online users. And they are not the only ones. In fact, the site’s performance across all devices is a direct conversion factor; for example, even a delay in page loading can cause a drop in sales.
The experience must be perfect: immediate loading, simple and non-superfluous elements, intuitive navigation. Speed and fluidity, measured by parameters such as Google’s Core Web Vitals, are not just a technical requirement, but a direct reflection of the brand’s professionalism.
