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As the financial economy continues to looks meek, I thought I would take this as an opportunity to discuss some tips on how to lower your shopping cart abandonment as we near the holiday season.  Whether you are looking to increase conversions or improve customer shopping satisfaction, here are some great tips to make your website more conversion friendly.

According to a 2007 MarketingSherpa study of 1,923 e-commerce respondents, the average shopping car abandonment rate is around 52%.  In lemans terms, this means that on average, 52% of consumers that add a product to a shopping cart, ultimately don’t make a purchase.  Although this statistic may appear high, it has actually dropped by nearly 10% from the previous year suggesting a general movement towards lower shopping cart abandonment. As a website owner faced with many decisions, one of them should be to increase output given a fixed (advertising spend) input.  As such, this same study also suggested the following top 3 most effective strategies for improving conversion rate:

• Testing shopping cart design & purchasing experience
• Tweaking internal search functions
• Testing product / feature copy

This is not to say that these will be the most effective for your shopping experience scenario, but they are good indicators where you may want to focus your efforts.  In addition to the above, here are some micro-strategies for addressing the above:

1. Show Progress- include a progress bar to show people what point in the check-out process.  This helps consumers visualize how many steps they have left.
2. Make it obvious- nothing is worse than having a shopping that doesn’t know how to check out.  This can be as easy as just changing the text on buttons to make it more obvious what to click next.
3. Make it Easy- review your checkout process and identify unnecessary steps.  A common pitfall is having a consumer add tedious information twice for their billing and shipping information that could be best solved with a “shipping information is the same” checkbox.  Additionally, you may consider including an add/remove feature helps shoppers update quantities within the shopping cart. 
4. Promote Vitals- don’t play the shipping cost surprise game at the checkout unless you want dissatisfied shoppers.  Equally as important is promoting exchange and return policies during the check-out process to ease the shoppers mind. 

The above tips may not appear “game changing” to some, however as we have come to know that little differences can add up to a lot.  Moreover, if adding any of the above components were to lower your shopping cart abandonment or increase your conversion by a small margin.  It could potentially translate into thousands if not millions in increased revenue over time without the added expense of spending more on advertising.  Lastly, the above scenario also could potentially improve customer satisfaction which ultimately lengthens the lifetime value of each customer and thus equates to more revenue in the long run. 

If you haven’t prepared your shopping experience for holiday season, there is still is plenty of time to stay in the game.  Review your shopping experience carefully and I believe that you may find a few extra bucks in your stocking.