Shopping Cart abandonment is the process of a customer adding things to their shopping cart with intent to purchase then never finalising the purchase and if you are running an eCommerce store it is likely to be costing you lost revenue. Some online store see figures up to 68% abandonment, over three quarters of their customer who place products in their cart do not finalise pay. This article is going to look at how you can minimise the impact of shopping cart abandonment on your sales.

Like all problems, In order to tackle the problem we firstly need to know what causes it. There are a multitude of reason why people abandon their carts, speaking to online customer and store owners we have pin pointed what we think at the top ten reason people doing finalise a purchase and where going to give you some guidance on how to avoid each one.

1. Cost of Shipping too high and not shown until checkout: Sticker Shock does not just happen on products, it's as much a problem with the shipping costs on your store. Especially if you sell low priced items. The best way to limit this is to make sure your customer know how much the delivery is going to cost them as soon as possible. Make sure you shopping cart page has a good estimate of the final shipping cost, and if possible place estimated shipping cost on your product pages.

2. Changed mind and discarded cart contents: If your customer genuinely changes their mind and decides not to purchase there is not much you can do about that. But you can try and minimise the chances of them becoming distracted. Removing all unnecessary links from the checkout process stops customer from clicking away from the checkout process. This can include removing site navigation during the process.

3. Comparison shopping or browsing: The popularity of shopping comparison sites is increasing all the time and there are really only two ways you can deal with this. The first is to undercut all your competitors and make sure you come up on the comparison sites as being the cheapest. Unfortunately this isn't always possible and the only other solutions is honesty, explaining why your products are at a higher price help, also more and more sites are beginning to include price comparisons with their competitors on their own site, if you show your customer you have nothing to hide then they are more likely to trust you and purchase from you.

4. Total cost of items is too high: Make sure that your customers are aware at all time of the value of the products in their shopping cart whilst they browse. Placing a simple running total at the top right of your store will make sure the customer is aware of the prices adding up and will not get sticker shock when they click on the 'What is in my cart' button.

5. Saving items for later purchase: Make sure your customer can do this easily, more current shopping cart software provides you with a facility to allow customers to save their carts and come back and checkout at a later date.

6. Checkout process is too long: Make sure your checkout process is as short as possible, and do not ask for information from your customer that they do not need. Do not make then enter their postal address multiple times for shipping and billing if they are the same. Also as stated above make sure there are no distraction in the checkout process.

7. Out of stock products at checkout time: Like shipping costs make sure you customers are aware as soon as possible that your products are in or out of stock as soon as possible. The best place to show this is in your product listings and on the product pages themselves.

8. Poor site navigation and long download times: There is nothing more infuriating than a slow loading site, make sure you work with your host to provide your customer with the fastest loading page possible, make sure you shopping cart software code is optimised and delivers pages fast.

9. Lack of sufficient product or contact information: Information = Reassurance, the more information your site contains about your company and your product the more reassurance it provides to the customer that they are going to get the products they want, and the products they ordered. Make sure that your product descriptions contain as much information as possible and they you include pages about your company including contact information. It is always good to have a phone number, most online shoppers will never call you, but a large number will be reassured that you are reachable on the phone if something goes wrong.

10. Site unclear on delivery times: Just like the above point, make sure you have all the information about your delivery times visible and easily accessible at all times, in an age when customer can get all the information they need at the clicking of their fingers they increasingly want their real world products just as fast.