3. It takes too long to close the deal.
Avoid clutter, shorten the checkout process, and keep your customers coming back.
Shopping online is all about convenience, and nothing is a bigger pain than lengthy forms that extend the checkout process. No wonder people click away in disgust. While there may be no way around forms for the time being, keep information that you request to a minimum. Demographics are nice to know, but they can also kill sales. Any good checkout process makes a distinction between a repeat shopper and a first-time buyer. Greet returning customers by getting them as close as possible to a single-click shopping process. Amazon.com leads in this area with the fastest possible checkout. The Gap also offers shoppers two clear shopping tracks, as well as an easy way to retrieve an account password.
A winning checkout system needs to be fast and easy. When your customers are ready to check out, keep the process shortâ€"at most four pages. Sites that spread out their checkout forms may be avoiding clutter, but they run the danger of stretching the experience out too long for the sake of clarity.
Major don'ts
Nothing is more discouraging than a navigational map that shows customers how far they are from finishing the checkout process but doesn't allow them to click on each section. The best, or worst, live example is Walmart.com's daunting checkout map: a full seven pages and an instant turn-off.
You have missed the most important point. Users abandon shopping trolleys - because they can! It's no problem. There's no comeback. They aren't real trolleys. No one gets hurt.
Why consider it as a problem? It's no different from window shopping. More people can do it and more will walk away because they had no real intention of buying in the first place.
You have lots of good advice about how to encourage potentiall buyers to purchase, all of it valid. But where's the problem? In a different paradigm, people will behave differently. Just because they put stuff in an internet shopping cart, ther is no implication that they ever intended to buy. Many will be just testing the system to see what happens, to try to understand how it works.
It may be that with the most perfect system, most visitors will never buy, so expending effort to improve the percentage is not cost effective.
My point is, understand the motivation of users and fix problems that really exist.