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Quote:Easy solutions to keep your online customers from ditching their shopping carts during checkout

Despite widespread knowledge of the problem, shopping-cart abandonment continues to plague e-tailers. In fact, 52 percent of shopping carts were abandoned last year...While myriad reasons might explain why prospective customers ditch the contents of a shopping cart at the last minute or fail to click the final "Buy Now" button, experts say a key reason is that the checkout process often simply takes too long.

...additional, easy tips to minimize shopping-cart abandonment:
# Remind people of what they're getting as they're checking out.
# Provide shipping costs early on.
# Show stock availability on the product page, and offer an estimated delivery date.
# Include a prominent "Next Step" or "Continue With Checkout" button on each checkout page.
# Add "shop with confidence" messages that remind customers of your security/privacy policies.

full article: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,46...50,00.html

Quote:# Provide shipping costs early on.

That's the biggest reason why I have abandoned shopping carts in the past.  Some sites don't mention their shipping prices anywhere on their site so that you have to go through their shopping cart to find out.

I found that happening so much that now when I find a site that has something I am interested in buying, if they do not have a section on their site saying their shipping fees without having to go through the shopping cart, I back out of their site and go elsewhere.

Lack of shipping costs is #1 but this is a biggie too

Quote:customers had to surf through five Web pages to check out—from the time they chose a product to when they received an order confirmation