August 04, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
As the economy continues to shake, etailers are not taking the fight sitting down. A recent survey issued by Forrester Research Inc. says that 79% of online merchants hope to enhance their checkout process to improve online sales and encourage more spending. Other improvements include image enhancements on product pages and a focus on site search in 2009.
For the most part, retailers plan on adding more transparency to shipping charges and taxes, which will help decrease cart abandonment. Other options to improve the checkout process include making it faster by using Express Checkout and 1 Page Checkout shopping carts, include totals for shoppers before they begin the checkout process, and using an always on-screen shopping cart. The “always on-screen cart” is a unique feature that allows shoppers to continually see their shopping cart, shipping costs, and tax on every page of a merchant’s site. Typically, shopping carts with this feature have a higher conversion rate than those without.
The survey is the 2nd of 3 installments from Forrester in a report they are dubbing the “State of Online Retailing 2009.” We covered the first installment in mid-July here.
Scott is an avid fan of all things ecommerce. His claim to fame is that he "puts the Zip in ZippyCart." He considers himself the world-wide number one reader of TechCrunch, C|Net, and The Ecommerce Times. Scott has worked in the SEO industry for many years, but found himself always shifting his focus to review sites and ecommerce blogs. When we decided to start the ZippyCart Ecommerce news, Scott was an obvious fit. He handles most of our OpEds as he is a very opinionated guy. Scott is also our Twitter guy, so don't hesitate to send him a tweet if you see him online.
