I don't know of any empirical studies undertaken in this area, but I believe stores like bn.com are moving in the right direction where they provide a summary of what was just entered into your cart at the top of each page.

this way you know you have stuff in your cart and its current value.

This is much closer to the actual cart metaphor, where you select thing you want and toss them in the cart. If asked at a random time what you had thrown into your cart, you could probably not list everything, but you could stop and check what is in there.

The bn.com example is very close to this, but actually lets you know how much you have racked up in $, thus making the process a little more user friendly.

So this a long winded way of saying hybrid of 1 and 2.

Posted by: JB on October 11, 2002 12:23 PM

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