We drill into different corners of ecommerce all the time, but we’d never done a whole episode on the cart. Sylvie Wilson is the person to fix that. She’s had two ecommerce businesses of her own, a matcha brand back in 2015 (ahead of its time, as she says) and a fashion label she ran for three years, and it was the fashion brand’s struggle with conversion and average order value that led her here.
During Black Friday 2023 she wanted to run a gift-with-purchase on an existing product and found no Shopify app could do it cleanly, you had to duplicate the SKU as a zero-dollar product, which wreaks havoc with your 3PL. Her husband James, a software engineer, built her a private version. Word spread, they launched it on the app store, and within a year they sold the fashion brand to go all-in on Unicorn Cart, now used by more than 400 brands worldwide.
Here’s what we took from a genuinely nerdy conversation about the cart.
The Cart Is the Billboard You’re Neglecting
Sylvie’s core message is that the cart is high-intent, high-value real estate that most brands waste. She sees brands fall into three camps: a bare cart page with nothing on it, a cart drawer with just the items and a checkout button, or a cart crammed with things but not actually optimised. The first group leaves the most money on the table.
The cart is like very valuable real estate. It is the billboard that people are neglecting.
- Sylvie Wilson, Co-Founder, Unicorn Cart
Her preferred setup is a cart drawer that slides out without navigating the customer away from where they’re browsing, which converts better because it’s more frictionless. And she makes a point most CRO conversations miss: the cart isn’t just an AOV tool, it’s a conversion tool, because it’s the exact moment a customer decides whether to go ahead. It can do both jobs at once, and Unicorn lets you target different blocks (cross-sells, gift offers, even different checkout buttons) based on whether someone’s a new or VIP customer, or what they’ve already added.
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Gift With Purchase: Make It Something People Actually Want
Sylvie’s first lesson came from getting it wrong. For that Black Friday gift-with-purchase, she used slow-moving C-grade stock, some pants in an unpopular colour, thinking she’d clear it. It flopped.
If they don’t want to buy it, they don’t want it for free and spend up to whatever to get it either.
- Sylvie Wilson, Co-Founder, Unicorn Cart
A good gift-with-purchase is something the customer genuinely wants: a travel or mini size of your bestseller for a beauty or supplement brand, or a brand-aligned complementary product like a gua sha tool or satin pillowcase that fits the customer’s routine. And the data backs the tactic hard. Looking across thousands of carts over 365 days, Unicorn found the average conversion rate was 23.7% higher when a gift-with-purchase offer was active, because it creates scarcity and a reason to buy now. Add a quantity limit (which reads as more legitimate than a countdown timer) to sharpen the urgency.
Test Everything, Because Your Assumptions Are Wrong
The strongest thread in the whole episode is that you cannot set and forget. Sylvie’s best proof is a gift-with-purchase threshold test a brand ran: $99 versus their usual go-to of $120. You’d assume the higher threshold drives more spend. The opposite happened.
You really cannot just set and forget anything.
- Sylvie Wilson, Co-Founder, Unicorn Cart
The $99 threshold delivered a 64% higher AOV, because when customers looked at the products, hitting $99 felt attainable and they added more to reach it, whereas $120 felt out of reach and they gave up. More people qualified, and they spent more overall. She saw the same counterintuitive pattern on free-shipping thresholds, where a lower threshold lifted conversion. The lesson: find your sweet spot through testing, then keep testing, because it moves as your range and your customers change. Unicorn lets you run these A/B tests by duplicating a cart and changing one thing, offer, threshold, design or copy.
Personalise the Cart by Customer and by Market
Relevance is where Sylvie sees ecommerce heading, and the cart is a powerful place to deliver it. Generic cross-sells get ignored. If someone adds a top, surface the matching bottoms. If a jewellery brand has a customer with a cheap charm in their cart, don’t push a $14k gold piece at them, it feels inaccessible.
That thinking extends to markets, and it can protect the brand as well as lift it. One swim brand was getting hit by US customers buying large orders, trying everything on, and returning it all, while the brand ate the tariffs it had promised to cover. Unicorn’s cart-value targeting let them remove that free-returns option for high-value orders in specific markets. The flip side is seasonal and shipping relevance: if you offer free shipping in Australia but not New Zealand, don’t let Kiwi customers see “free shipping unlocked,” because nothing kills conversion like an offer that vanishes at checkout.
The UX Rules: Don’t Make Them Think
On cart UX, Sylvie is firm that anything touching the cart is ultra-sensitive, so A/B test it rather than guessing (plain cart versus optimised cart is a test worth running). Her practical do’s: keep a sticky, prominent checkout button so it’s always visible as people scroll, and don’t overload the cart with so many messages it becomes overwhelming.
Her sharpest tip is about clarity of the offer itself. If a brand gets confused explaining their offer to her, the customer has no chance of understanding it at a glance. Don’t make the customer do the maths. The same goes for product detail in the cart: show images large enough to confirm what they’ve got, make the selected size clearly visible (wrong size is a top reason people bounce back into the site), and section cross-sells off with a differently styled secondary button so it’s obvious what’s in the cart versus what’s a suggestion. Small wording changes matter too, “complete the set” or “complete your routine” outperforms “you may also like,” because it frames adding as finishing a task.
Don’t Train Customers to Wait for a Discount
On cart abandonment, Sylvie is measured. Around 70% of carts are abandoned globally, and Unicorn’s data shows abandonment peaks in September and October and bottoms out in November (for the obvious Black Friday reason). You want to reduce it, but a discount isn’t the only lever, and using one predictably just trains customers to wait for it.
Her advice is to vary the offer: sometimes a gift-with-purchase, sometimes a bundle upsell, sometimes just a reminder, and if you do use a discount, show it once rather than again and again. A small discount can be worth it to win a first-time customer’s trust and unlock their lifetime value, but blanket site-wide discounting devalues the brand. She also flagged returns protection as a rising conversion lever: a maternity brand saw an 8% conversion uplift by offering customers returns protection for $4 rather than risking a $12 return fee themselves.
The Takeaway
The cart is the most overlooked, highest-intent surface in most ecommerce stores, and treating it as a real part of your CRO strategy rather than a checkout step is the whole opportunity. Serve the right offer to the right person at the right moment, make the gift something people actually want, keep the experience clean enough that nobody has to think, and above all, never set and forget. As Sylvie proves again and again with her own data, the results are almost never what you’d assume.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the cart matter so much for conversion and AOV? Because it’s the highest-intent moment in the journey, the point where a customer decides whether to check out. Most brands treat it as a step rather than part of their CRO strategy, leaving money on the table. A well-optimised cart drawer can lift both average order value (through relevant cross-sells and gift thresholds) and conversion (by reducing friction and adding reasons to buy now).
What makes a good gift-with-purchase offer? Something the customer genuinely wants, not slow-moving stock you’re trying to clear. Strong options include a mini or travel size of a bestseller, or a brand-aligned complementary product. Unicorn Cart’s data showed a 23.7% higher conversion rate when a gift-with-purchase was active, and adding a quantity limit creates legitimate urgency.
Should you set a higher or lower gift/free-shipping threshold? Test it, because assumptions often fail. In one A/B test, a $99 gift-with-purchase threshold produced a 64% higher AOV than the brand’s usual $120, because $99 felt attainable so customers added more to reach it. Lower free-shipping thresholds have similarly lifted conversion in testing. The right number is brand-specific and changes over time.
How do you handle cart abandonment without devaluing your brand? Vary your offers rather than relying on predictable discounts that train customers to wait. Use gift-with-purchase, bundles or reminders, and if you use a discount, show it once. A small discount can win a first-time customer’s trust, but blanket site-wide discounting erodes brand value. Returns protection is also emerging as a strong conversion lever.
What are the key cart UX rules? Keep a sticky, prominent checkout button, don’t overload the cart with messages, and make offers simple enough to understand at a glance. Show product images and selected sizes clearly to prevent customers bouncing back into the site, and clearly distinguish cross-sell suggestions from items already in the cart using a differently styled secondary button.
