Call to action buttons play an integral part in increasing conversions on your website. If your CTA buttons don't entice the user to click on them, or if they're difficult to find, it can mean that your website loses the visitor together with a potential sale.

What is the best wording (button text) for a shopping cart button?

'Add to Cart' seems to be the most popular button text, I've noticed a number of South African websites using 'Buy Now'.

Below are some statistics on some of the most commonly used shopping cart button text:

Button Text
Add to Cart 58.0%
Add to Bag 9.8%
Add to Shopping Bag 9.8%
Add to Basket 6.3%
Add to Shopping Cart 4.5%
Buy 2.7%
Buy Now 1.8%

What text do you think works best?

Sure it has some industry specific differences. EG: 'Add to shopping bag' may be suited to an online fashion retailer.

I also feel that 'Buy Now' may make the user feel that once that have clicked on the button they are committed to the purchase and may not be able to go back.

Colour also plays a significant part in the effectiveness of add to cart buttons. Green stands for go, red is a traditionally strong call to action, but may signal a warning. White and grey seem rather boring.

Obviously your add to cart button has to fit in with the design of the rest of your website, but what colours work best to get a customer to take action?

Another aspect is the add to cart button graphics.
Does an arrow work better than a shopping cart or a plus sign?

Here are some statistics on button graphics:

None 46%
Arrows 17%
Cart 14%
Shopping Bag 7%
Plus Sign 5.4%
Unique 1.8%

Below you will see our current add to cart button:

Excellent and useful article. Thanks.

Mmm

One wonders whether there has been and A|B split testing of the various text options, or whether the Add to Cart option is just a convention that stemmed from usage in most open source ecommerce solutions. Probably worth investigating.