Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Keeping Your Shopping Cart Simple

Most studies about online shopping include the percentage of online e-commerce shopping carts that are left abandoned by their users. Some statistics state that customers abandon anywhere from 45 to 90 percent of all shopping carts, for a variety of reasons:

• They're turned off by the high cost of either the item or the shipping and handling.
• They can't find all the information or functionality that they need to finish.
• They're uncomfortable registering or handing over credit card data online.
• They're unsure how to completely check out with their items and pay for their purchases.
• They're afraid to place their final orders.

For these reasons, keep in mind some helpful tips and avoid the common traps of having shopping carts on your e-commerce site:

• Make the shopping cart easy to find. Sometimes, the only way for customers to even access their shopping carts is to click a link that's available on only certain Web pages. At other times, they see their shopping carts only after adding items. Put the shopping cart link at or near the top of every Web page (as shown in Figure 4-5). Create a second browser window that's small or always minimized, and put the shopping cart information on that screen.

  

  Figure 4-5: Put your shopping cart in a consistent ...