You have your store, you have your products, now it’s just a waiting game for customers, Right? wrong! I would like to know if you take the time to shop your own store, and how often? I browse and shop my site once a week, and not just to add an item to my cart but to place a full order, yes, a full order.  You might think “that will mess up my stats!” well, would you rather have stats that are off every so often, or a failed shopping cart?  You need to see if your card processor is working, and to know what to expect when a customer goes into your cart.  If you miss something, then your customer is going to miss something.

When you add an item to cart does the site change? Why? In the days of internet fraud customers need to see the cart stay the same throughout the checkout proces, and in a Yahoo store or Merchant solutions accounts the cart is hosted on a separate server than the store.  It does not by default look like the template you choose.  It is a plain yellow color that never matches, but it is easy to take some time in your day and change that and even add a logo to the page (header if you have it).  Also the Yahoo badge program in the store manager has a few nice Yahoo badges to use. Are you a PayPal user? are you Verified with Paypal? get the Verified badge from PayPal, because every little trust mark will help towards reducing your cart abandonment rate.

Do you run Google or Yahoo Analytics?  If not, why not? Google Analytics is free for everyone and Yahoo Analytics is Free for yahoo store and Yahoo Merchant solutions Standard and Pro. Google needs to be setup in order to track the cart all the way through but yahoo analytics will set its self up to track the cart and is real-time.  Take a look at your analytics and it will show you where your “would be” customers are leaving.   Like lets say that people are leaving from your shopping cart page and not even moving to check out, you might need to show the shipping options on that page so customers will know how much it will cost them, also you might need to try a single page checkout. If you have shipping and billing pages on separate pages you may see customers dropping on the shipping page and not making it to billing, try making it one page with shipping and billing on one page, the less the customer has to click the better!

One last item on my list of cart do’s and don’ts would be the added CRAP that is right CRAP, adding extra fields that are required but only for your benefit or asking for off the wall items will not make your customer want to come back.  Another one that the yahoo store does not have to worry about yet is making the customer register on your store!  let them check out one time, you may want them as a return customer and no one has said that they will not return but let them sign up on their own terms.  Forcing customers to register to purchase from your store is an excellent way to increase cart abandonment and kill revenue.

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