Add to Cart Disclaimers are a simple way to set expectations straight and honestly with your eCommerce customer. I will give you a bit of a background on how bad things were and the improvements after we added Add to Cart Disclaimers.
Have you seen any of these types of emails lately?
“I bought something in S but I change my mind, please change my order”
“I got your product but I picked the wrong order, can I exchange it?”
“Can I get a refund?”
With the emergence of Amazon and cheap returns,we found it difficult to keep up with the consumer’s expectations in the eCommerce world. Those are the kinds of emails I’d get myself 3 years ago as a Shopify owner.
It’s not because we didn’t love our customers, we worked extremely hard to get 5 star reviews verified independently.
It was simply so costly to ship goods back and forth. A product may cost $20, but shipping one way costs $10. Shipping things back another $10.
In other words, one refund and exchange would cancel out the profits for 4-5 other orders. It would cause delays and unhappiness no matter the circumstances for both the customer waiting for an exchange, or a small business issuing the refund knowing that the product shipped is not coming back.
So How Does Add to Cart Disclaimers Work?
Whether at the cart page or during check out, customer gets a CLEAR message which sets a realistic expectation.
If you can not maintain easy exchanges and returns, the customer should see something like this:
So Which Plugin Works Best for This?
Now we’ve tested a few plugins in this field and picked one that was simple, lightweight and reliable on mobile. Unfortunately, things change so fast in tech, our version of the plugin has been absorbed by WooCommerce officially, and we are not going to update it because too many times I’ve seen big-team developers add bloatware to plugins!
Here is the “rare” plugin that we are sticking with until it breaks by WPExperts, a company with many good plugins under it’s belt. (please note this entire blog post is NOT sponsored in anyway, it’s simply a reflection of what tools we are using).
If you’re not giving me automatic updates, I aint updating!
You could also try WPExpert’s latest paid version of the plugin:
Alternatives
For this kind of plugin it needs to be done right. If you’re going with a bad piece of code, it could potentially block out add to cart functions and lose your orders. I would start by testing officially supported WooCommerce plugins via their own plugin storefront.