Getting Customers to Complete Check Out

They are putting stuff in the cart....

[iJeep]

I have been working on the site a lot lately. I have added a lot of tracking and am able to see that a lot of people are putting stuff in their cart, but not checking out. Only about 20% of the people actually make the purchase.

I don't know what more I could do, I have it where there is a large check out button at the cart that is more than obvious. There is also a shopping cart sidebar with a checkout link on it. Also, this week I added an order now button to the product pages so that they can go straight from viewing the product to the check out process.

What is there to get these people to complete the process?

Would it help to remove the normal header and footer from the pages at the cart and check out so that they don't look like part of the site (I see a lot of sites do this)?

[4crests]

Found these statistics in an article on Shopping Cart Abandonment. It shows the percentages of why people leave your checkout without purchasing. Of course, these percentages are vastly different depending on your product. My site is even worse, I only have about 3% who actually make a purchase. Luckily, I get about 1,000 people a day in my shopping cart. It's amazing how much can be gained by tweaking your checkout process. I recently changed some stuff around and went from 2% up to 3%. The one below I tweaked was the "Checkout process is too long". I am working on some of the others still.

High shipping prices (72%)

Comparison shopping or browsing (61%)

Changed mind (56%)

Saving items for later purchase (51%)

Total cost of items is too high (43%)

Checkout process is too long (41%)

Checkout requires too much personal information (35%)

Site requires registration before purchase (34%)

Site is unstable or unreliable (31%)

Checkout process is confusing (27%)