Professor Fram of the Rochester Institute of Technology believes vendors and service providers in the security and e-commerce industries need to do a better job collectively of alleviating fears for the sake of individual retailers. "While the actual potential for security problems is modest, this information needs to be circulated more publicly to reduce consumer fears," Fram explained. "This obviously should have some positive impact on the high rate of shopping cart abandonment. The industry cannot depend on the mass media to do the job."

At the individual e-tailer level, though, you can post reassurances about privacy, security seals, and offer multiple payment options that give customers more comfort. In fact, a Quality Research Associates poll indicates sellers who accept four payment types, such as credit cards, debit cards, online checks and services like PayPal, have higher conversion rates than those who offer a single payment method. Conversely, asking for too much personal information in the shopping cart forms may make the shopper feel less secure about doing business with you.

Ease of Use

Of course, for all the other strategies, cart design is still a factor and optimizing cart design should not be an abandoned thought. If the checkout process is confusing to your grandma, then your process isn't user friendly enough. Before you begin optimizing your shopping cart, be sure to collect Key Performance Indicators such as "cart competition rate," "checkout completion rate," and "ratio of checkout starts to cart starts." You can't measure your improvement if you don't know where you started.

"Navigation that 'is really cool' to a designer or Web programmer is often incomprehensible for online shoppers," said Susan Daffron, co-author of Web Business Success. "Avoid the temptation to include overly flashy, bandwidth-hogging bells and whistles. Some people may be using slow connections and even those on broadband often cite slow response time as a prime reason for 'bailing out' of a shopping site."

You should also streamline the checkout process by using as few steps as possible and experts recommend using a progress indicator to let the visitor to know what to expect next in a step-by-step process. Making it easy for customers to change the quantity and using thumbnail images of items in the cart to remind customers what's in there are also winning strategies for reducing shopping cart abandonment. Of course, all sites are different and there is no one overarching strategy. That's where Web analytics come into play. (continued...)

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