One mistake that a lot of business owners usually make is focusing too much on attracting visitors to their sites but almost ignoring the process of converting visitors into customers. And then, when they check the sale volume, they feel frustrated, sale revenue does not increase due to the troubles of adding items to shopping basket. Conversion rate optimization is a suggested method for this fact, it covers variety of aspects but one of the most typical things is what happens related to shopping cart, for more details, in this article, we will mention to a problem call: shopping cart abandonment.

In short, it occurs when customers  put some products on their basket on your sites but finally they do not proceed to the checkout. To make sure that you are not trapped in cart abandonment, let's consider some reasons why customers abandon their basket:

• They are searching and intend to buy but some external factors such as phone ring or baby wakes up, so they decide to turn back tomorrow.
• They just consider basket as a wish list, they add and only buy all when they are ready.
• After all, your products are not what they really want
• Checkout process is too complicated, they will choose the more simple one

How to improve your cart

Except for all the external and subjective factors related to customers life mentioned, the most important reason comes from the experience you provide them. They get stuck, feel confused and even disappointed when trying to use your checkout. If you find some solutions to simplify your checkout, reduce unnecessary steps, we sure that your cart abandonment rate will drop significantly. You can refer some product such as One page checkout for Virtuemart or Responsive Magento One step checkout extension. This two products from Cmsmart have the common feature is reducing checkout time and steps, so eliminating cart abandonment issues.

You can click to image to see the live demo

One page checkout for Virtuemart

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Responsive Magento One step checkout extension

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• Running some user testing.
• Putting yourself in consumers' position. Let's take a look over all your checkout and then critically analyze it. Only when you see yourself as a customer, under the objective look, do you recognize exactly where is it confusing, the text is fine or not, navigation button is clear enough? etc.

Besides that, you should make sure to do all the things mentioned below:

• Removing the rest of the website navigation from the cart to avoid distractions
• The delivery pricing should be clear and obvious
• Never forcing to create accounts or registration
• Providing multiple payment options such as Paypal, Amazon checkout or bitcoin, we mean anything related to your customers
• Taking advantages of a postcode look-up/address finder solution
• With mobile checkout, make sure each text entry box is set up to trigger the correct keyboard