[tweetmeme]An important element of selling online is making it easy for shoppers to buy your products. Success in online retailing hinges in large part to providing a convenient shopping experience for customers — and one of the ways to achieve this is by addressing the problem of shopping cart abandonment.
According to Jupiter Research, only 64 percent of shopping carts filled on an e-commerce site will ultimately result in a purchase.
To make sure that the number of customers abandoning their shopping cart is minimized, here are what some of the top retailers are doing to improve their shopping carts and increase sales:
- Retailers such as Overstock.com and the athletic shoe and apparel store FinishLine.com both include a thumbnail image of the item in the shopping cart. Having a small photo of the item being ordered gives customers the assurance that they are ordering the correct item. For FinishLine.com, the implementation of this strategy increased their conversion rate by 10 percent.
- Diane von Furstenberg http://www.dvf.com is one of the online retailers who have moved away from page-based HTML shopping carts to perpetual or floating ones using advanced technology such as AJAX or Adobe Flash. Termed as “perpetual” shopping carts, the cart is then available onscreen no matter where the visitor travels on the site.
- Skymall.com makes it easy for customers to change or add products in their shopping carts when they hit the proceed to Checkout button. Instead of the first step of the buying process which is the filling up of registration information, the customer can fill up the form and still see the items in their cart.