In a recent study, NetIQ, the company behind WebTrends, predicts $63 billion in sales will be lost in the U.S. alone in 2004 due to shopping cart abandonment. What if you could convert just three more visitors into buyers out of every thousand who visit your site?

If your conversion rate is 3.0 percent, those additional three visitors would increase conversion to 3.3 percent. That may not sound like much, but it’s a 10 percent increase in revenue. Plus or minus 10 percent could make or break many e-tailers’ holiday season.

Four most common contributing factors leading to abandonment are:

+Additional costs, such as shipping and handling, or lengthy delivery times (35 percent)

+Too much consumer information required to make the purchase (30 percent)

+Lack of product information (17 percent)

+Decision to purchase from a brick-and-mortar store rather than online (14 percent)

What to do?

+Create a conversion funnel. Look at visitors from the time they enter the site and view a product all the way through purchase. Where do they drop off? The further down in the process, the lower the drop-off rate should be at each step, as visitors are more invested in the process.

+Focus improvements on a selected area.

+Determine what causes the drop off.

+Set up a simple A/B test.

+Roll out the best-performing solution to all visitors based on your conversion goals.