Try These Tactics to Cut Shopping Cart Abandons

Shopping cart abandonment--meaning website visitors who start the buying process but leave without completing a transaction--is a basic challenge to online conversion. A recent Mobile Marketer post by Tom Villante, chairman and CEO of YapStone, cites six ways digital marketers can plug the online buyer drain. Start by making the buying process easy, and reduce transaction steps, he suggests. Next, deploy a mobile-first strategy for e-commerce; when 25% of mobile phone owners use them to access the Internet, 90% of mobile searches lead to action, and over half of mobile searches lead to sales, there's no ignoring the need to optimize customers' mobile experience. Seek and leverage social proof from social media reviews to boost trust and encourage customers on the purchase track. Pay attention to design, content and usability overall, and, via web analytics and usability testing, pay extra attention to pages where shopping carts are most often abandoned. Make it quick and easy to upload account information and payment info; for mobile applications, OCR scanning of credit/debit cards permits quick, less-error-prone account set-up. Target your retargeting and respect customer privacy; don't drive customers further away by peppering them with re-promotions online of the product they abandoned.  For more detail, read http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/columns/22436.html