I was looking at some things on the Target website, and decided to add them to my cart. However, I didn’t plan to buy them that day, but instead, sometime later in the week. Would the site save my cart for that long? Who knows. So I did the logical thing: I tried to print out the shopping cart page.

Unfortunately, the Target shopping cart isn’t designed for printing. Only three items showed up on the printout, and there was no way to print extra pages with the full contents. This is a missed opportunity: especially with higher ticker or high decision products, many shoppers will want to print out or otherwise save their item list so they can think about the purchase and easily locate those items later, without taking a chance that the online cart contents have expired.

To address this problem, e-commerce sites should ensure that their shopping cart pages can be printed out. In other words, you should provide a clean list of each item in the cart, no matter how long the list might be. For each product, include the product name along with an item number or SKU so that customers can easily find that item later on your website. And to avoid any confusion, make sure the page includes the date it was printed and some text saying that prices are subject to change. By adopting these simple changes, you’re making it much easier for customers to save and retrieve their planned purchases, which should ultimately lead to higher sales.