Widgetopia

bucket o' fonts

found on Chank

Chank, designer of so many wonderful fonts including Taco Bell's, uses a bucket rather than a shopping cart. I'm sure this would take a knock from jakob for its inconstancy with shopping standards, but it is so consistent to the charming chank voice and attitude I'm gonna say its a fine fine thing.

huh?

found on Craft Product

and the winner for most abstract shopping cart iconography goes to... Craft Product!

bizarre.

cartless

Me: Okay, I'm ready to check out let's go to the shopping cart and... hmm. Shopping cart? Current order? Is that the same thing? I guess. *click*

Why break a Web wide convention and replace a shopping cart with order?

buy buy buy

Points to notice and question:
- "add to cart/bag/basket" clearly dominates "buy now," which, uninterestly enough, is used only on buy.com.
- Some definitely seem more button-like and clickable than others.
- It's interesting to see how they reflect 1) the shopping carts for the same stores and 2) the store brand
- Does a bigger button lead to more sales?

Anything else?

zooming

from Red Envelope

+ and - are the usual icons for zoom in and out, though we usually see them in a magnifying glass, as seen here from the Photoshop program. The "reset" is an oft forgetten and very useful control, allowing for the viewer to get back to zero, after much fussing. It's less important to an experienced navigator (like a photoshop user, perhaps), but for a shopper who could get lost in fine details, it is a nice safty net.

These controls were found in a an extremely slick feature on Red Envelope -- you not only can look at a larger image as you can on most well-designed shopping sites, but you can continue to zoom and then slide the object around within the zoomwindow around to look at areas of the image... unfortunately they haven't found a way to change the cursor from pointing finger to grabbing hand (the typical icon established by adobe for moving around an image, as seen below from photoshop again).

Photoshop's hand affords grabbing and sliding the image	Red Envelope's doesn't change, and looks like it affords clicking rather than sliding.

cart-ography

Target goes for the shopping bag, Amazon for the shopping cart.

Interestingly enough, Starbucks, Peets , The Gap and RedEnvelope all eschew an icon for their cart/bags. Is the omnipresent shopping cart (and its occasional alternative, the bag) coming to an end?

Somehow I doubt it.

The choice of characteristic elements of cart-ness is interesting. For reference, check out an actual shopping cart