4. Customers don't feel safe in your store.
Give customers reason to trust youâ€"tell them that someone is behind the screen ready to help.
Shoppers demand more than security online. Getting customers to trust you must happen throughout the site, not just when they use their credit card.
Establishing trust with your customers means making service a priority by giving them multiple ways to contact you and providing them with a timely reply. The GartnerGroup studied the top 50 e-tail sites and found that only 10 percent allow the customer to track inquiries through to resolution, and only 28 percent will acknowledge that they received your e-mail.
The human touch, especially in a faceless online world, is important to customers. Lands' End has 250 sales reps ready to answer questions live onlineâ€"and it pays: Their Internet orders end up averaging $10 more than catalog orders.
Ensure the privacy of your customer data in a clearly worded and easy-to-find policy, particularly if your site supports Web cookiesâ€"files that track and store user information. More than 20 percent of respondents to our Ziff Davis Smart Business reader poll said they had stopped an e-commerce transaction because they felt the site wasn't secure. Display the logos of consumer protection sites, like Gomez.com or the Better Business Bureau, that have rated your service. Also, make sure you spell out your encryption standards by using recognisable signs such as the VeriSign logo, and explain how credit card information is transmitted to your site's servers.
Finally, don't let customers get to the very end of the shopping process and slip them an unexpectedly high shipping cost. Spell out your shipping terms up front in a separate policy page that shoppers can find easily. Fifty-six percent of the customers in The Yankee Group study bailed out at the last minute when they found out the shipping charges were too expensive.
Major don'ts
Don't hide your customer service information. The more prominently you can post a telephone number, mailing address, and e-mail link, the more you tell people that someone is behind the screen ready to help. Make sure you provide answers to frequently asked questionsâ€"it will save time for both you and your customers.
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.