RIS News Article - Reducing Cart Abandonment

RIS News (subtitled, “the most influential retail technology publication”) ran an article about a critical topic to online retailers, the scourge of shopping cart abandonment. Why do shoppers go through the process of visting a site, choosing products, adding to cart, entering personal data to then just ditch the whole deal?

Certainly, smart e-tailers wanna know why carts are dumped so close to conversion and then do what they can to prevent abandonment. Reasons can be as simple as the customer wanting to see the grand total - including tax and shipping - while comparison shopping, or maybe the shopper felt uncomfortable entering personal info prior to seeing that total, or maybe they just got cold feet before committing to the purchase because there was some small reason for mistrust.

Debbie Hauss’ article Techsplanation: Beefing Up Online Sales rounds-up a variety of tools - including Elastic Path’s One Page check out system - which are all designed to track and prevent cart abandonment with the aim of increasing conversions.

More after the break …

Here are a few snippets to whet your appetite before you go read the rest about New tools address checkout, security and abandoned carts.

E-Commerce sales continue to increase at lightning speed, despite the economic climate. Second-quarter 2006 sales were up 4.6 percent over first-quarter sales, reaching $26.3 billion, according to The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce. Total retail sales for the second quarter of 2006 were estimated at $984.9 billion, an increase of 0.9 percent from the first quarter of 2006.

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Vendors in the retail industry are furiously trying to keep up with the growth, by providing new tools for retailers looking to increase and improve their online presence.

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Single Click Checkout
Elastic Path Software introduces Elastic Path One Page, a new single page checkout technology that allows returning customers to complete online orders with a single click. The company’s AJAX-powered One Page checkout is available with Elastic Path 5, the most recent advancement of its e-Commerce platform. Elastic Path offers a 100 percent browser-based Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)-powered one page checkout. AJAX technology enables Web pages to be more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind-the-scenes so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change.

Note: You can learn more about Elastic Path’s, reduced-barrier, streamlined and Ajax-i-fied checkout on the One Page Data Sheet.